November 2015 Southern California Edition

Hello, 911? Someone’s Using 409!by Gayatri Subramaniam

India’s Sports Leaguesby Roshn Marwah

Levitating Yogini in Krakowby Nagaraja Rao

Celebrating 29 Years of Excellence

INDIA CURRENTS

by Ritu Marwah

november 2015 • vol. 29 , no .8 • www. indiacurrents.com

The turbulence of politics and romance

Celebrating 29 Years of Excellence

Jinnah’s Daughter

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Modi’s Invisible Suit

He came to Santa Clara like an In-dian messiah, rose up on stage, folded his hands in humble sup-

plication, then stood straight and tall as he let his voice ring out exhorting the jubi-lant, worshipful crowd to repeat phrases after him at the SAP center on a hot, packed September day. It was Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi at his persuasive best.

Yet the western media hardly paid Mr. Modi much mind. At the Facebook event, a conversation between Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Modi, the press section was woe-fully under-occupied. I was present at the event and I met a reporter from CNN’s online technology bureau, a tech reporter from Inc’s SF bureau, and a reporter from the Mercury News. There were a few I did not meet, including a reporter from the Financial Times who wrote a piece which seemed to miss the point that Mr. Modi was in the United States to drive up in-vestment in India and not to entice Indian Americans back to India.

Mr. Modi’s visit coincided with the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit. Both leaders met with the founders and titans of the technology industry. Both ostensi-bly for the same purpose: to recognize the buying power of the countries they repre-sented. Mr. Xi hardly received the kind of reception from Chinese immigrants in the United States that Mr. Modi received from Indian Americans. Yet there was much discussion before and after the Chinese leader’s visit across U.S. media platforms, and barely a stirring of subtitles about Narendra Modi.

Go ahead, do a quick search on “Xi Jinping’s US visit,” you’ll discover reports from The New York Times, Time, Financial Times, BBC, NBC, and if you do a search on “Narendra Modi’s US visit”: NDTV, the Indian Embassy and Mr. Modi’s own website narendramodi.in are the leading results.

So what does Narendra Modi’s lack of international media visibility signify?

It may have something to do with the contradictions that India and its leader both present.

When it comes to India, the contra-dictions are all too well known and well documented: spiritualism and materialism, the worship of goddesses and the lack of respect for women, abject poverty and

obscene wealth, democratic elections and autocratic power-mongering …

And, too, with Narendra Modi, there is much to applaud and caution. I admire Mr. Modi’s awe-inspiring work ethic; his ability to break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable subsets; his foresight and vision when it comes to India’s economic growth; his impatience with corruption and bureaucracy; his so-cial media savvy; and his ability to make quick decisions.

It is likely true that no one leader can undertake all the issues that India presents. It becomes a question of priority and com-promise. And with those two inadequate words, there ends up being much to dislike and disapprove.

On stage Mr. Modi is convincing. He tells you that he is an effective administra-tor, and a passionate nationalist. He is not ashamed of calling himself a Hindu and for bringing up (Hindu) heroes who have fought for India. He asks, no, demands validation, and the arena echoes with exu-berant support.

And yet Mr. Modi fills me with ap-prehension. While I marvel at his gran-

diloquence on stage, it seems too much like a mind-altering marketing exercise. For all of Mr. Modi’s volubility when it comes to his areas of strengths—technol-ogy, business, bureaucracy—there is not one ameliorating word spoken on those ar-eas of sensitivity: India’s cultural, religious and social diversity. And I wish he had the kind of bravery, that Abraham Lincoln-like bravery that would compel him to explain his failures as well as his successes, his wor-ries as well as his victories.

So it is no surprise that the imagina-tion cannot come to grips with these con-tradictions. And hence, it seems, there is a cautious calibration of Mr. Modi’s popu-larity on a guarded “wait and watch” cycle.

In spite of these contradictions though, maybe the lack of headlines is a testament to Mr. Modi’s successful Silicon Valley sojourn. In the media’s quest for titillat-ing titles, phrases like crisis in crimea, civil war, cyberwarfare sometimes take front page. And hence, as the saying goes, “no news is good news.”

Jaya Padmanabhan, Editor

2 | INDIA CURRENTS | Southern California |November 2015


INDIA CURRENTSPERSPECTIVES Southern California Edition

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November 2015 • vol 29 • no 8

1 | EDITORIALModi’s Invisible SuitBy Jaya Padmanabhan

6 | WORDS AND THINGSThere Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long AgoBy Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

7 | PERSPECTIVEHello, 911? Someone’s Using 409!By Gayatri Subramaniam

17 | SCIENCEThe Toll of ScarcityBy P. Mahadevan

18 | FICTIONCourageBy Vivek Santhosh

20 | COMMENTARYTulip ManiaBy Bharti Kirchner

26 | ON INGLISHThe Sound of My NameBy Kalpana Mohan

31 | DESI VOICESHouse #152By Usha Rao

56 | THE LAST WORDThe Mediocre World of Malcolm GladwellBy Sarita Sarvate

LIFESTYLE

46 | Cultural Calendar

50 | Spiritual Calendar

21 | TAX TALKTax on Children’s InvestmentsBy Rita Bhayani

28 | BOOKSReview of Discontent and its CivilizationsBy Rajesh C. Oza

40 | MUSICMahadeva Gets the Nomination!By Priya Bhatt Das

42 | RECIPESA Squashable FestivalBy Shanta Sacharoff

45 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA Overcoming Anxiety and Getting that First DateBy Jasbina Ahluwalia

48 | HEALTHY LIFEFrom Villain to VictorBy Ronesh Sinha

54 | DEAR DOCTOR Dealing with Reactions to My PregnancyBy Alzak Amlani

DEPARTMENTS4 | Letters to the Editor11 | Popular Articles

WHAT’S CURRENT

22 | Ask a Lawyer23 | Visa Dates

Exploring Jinnah’s relationship with his daughter

By Ritu Marwah

8 | Jinnah’s Daughter

Reviews of Talvar, Singh is Bliing, The Visit

By Aniruddh Chawda, Madhumita Gupta

32 | Travel

Levitating Yogini in Krakow

By Nagaraja Rao

36 | Films

24 | SportsIndia’s Sports Leagues

By Roshn Marwah


SPEAK YOUR MIND!

Have a thought or opinion to share? Send us an original letter of up to 300 words, and include your name, address, and phone number. Letters are edited for clarity and brevity.

Write India Currents Letters, 1885 Lundy Ave. Suite 220, San Jose 95131 or email [email protected].

letters to the editor

Finding Peace Nirupama Vaidyanathan’s beautiful es-

say about finding a cure for her loneliness at Costco is a lesson for us all. (“Grief and Costco,” India Currents, October 2015)

Just as God is in all of us, peace and harmony as well as a sense of belonging can be found among the aisles of 50 inch televisions, ceiling high packs of Sam-E and endless rows of paper products. I sometimes find that the busyness of the train station at Whitefield or the Civic Center Bart station at 5 p.m. can offer beautiful opportunities for meditation.

There are many places and people in the world to assist us on our spiritual and earthly paths but sometimes the perfect place is where we are. We just have to be sensitive to our needs and be open and aware of what the universe is already pro-viding for our healing.

Warren Rose, Martinez, CA

Diversity and ObjectivityMany thanks for printing my letter in

your October issue about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his governance (in response to two articles in September). You do encourage diversity, but sometimes it’s misused. Facts are also interpreted and distorted by writers. However, free speech and free writing have no limit.

Yatindra Bhatnagar

Being Unique Kalpana Mohan’s article about chu-

ridars made me pause and reflect (“The Churidar Gets a Nod,” India Currents, August 2015).

We all have our stories. For me, it hap-pened organically. I can’t remember pre-cisely when I started wearing my churidar outfits to non-Indian events. My earliest recollection is that of the early 2000s when I began wearing churidar kurtas to work on casual days.

After an entire generation of women was taught how to “Dress for Success,”

came the challenge of “Appropriate Attire” for casual days. Our employee handbook contained a long list of what was not ac-ceptable for women to wear.

I only had a few churidar outfits but thought they seemed to fit the defini-tion of what was appropriate for casual Fridays. I also thought it would be good to use them more often than just wearing them occasionally to Indian events. So, on Fridays, I donned the Indian outfit. After a few months of double-takes, the com-ments began to flow ... “Where did you buy that?” “Is that hand-embroidered?” “Wow, the color of your pants matches the color of your shirt!” “I’ve never seen that design!” Co-workers loved the outfits. And, these comments came from men and women.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve worn a myriad of Indian outfits to western so-cial events, from fundraising galas to the Ahmanson Theater to Disney Hall to the Hollywood Bowl or just out to dinner. The reception has been unexpectedly fantastic! Men and women comment on how beauti-fully breathtakingly elegant the outfits are! Individuals strike up conversations, from describing their own trips to India, to at-tending their Indian friend’s wedding or just to remark on the lovely outfit.

I’ve concluded that the positive re-sponse I’ve encountered may be due to a combination of factors: perhaps since my husband is Caucasian, we don’t conform to an ethnic stereotype; living in Los An-geles, where creativity rules is definitely a plus; the love affair between Hollywood and fashion is prevalent: Hollywood stars, millionaires and billionaires have admir-ingly bestowed compliments on my ethnic attire.

I feel totally accepted by my American compatriots. The quizzical looks, none-theless, come from my fellow Indians, who, with their glances seem to say, “Why would I want to wear a custom-made outfit and be uniquely me when I can pur-chase an off-the-rack outfit and look like everyone else?

Punita Khanna, Los Angeles, CA

Self-help Blame and ShameThe article by Sarita Sarvate on self-

help (“Annoyed by the Self-help Cult? You Are Not Alone!” India Currents, October 2015) is a ridiculous generalisation. No doubt the “self-help” industry has its share of charlatans and exploiters, but it is ab-surd to write off the entire sector. Many personal development programs deliver dramatic perfomance improvements, and often inspire their customers to make posi-tive contributions to the quality of life for others.

Derek Deardon, website

Having been a part of the new age self help movement for around 15 years, I completely agree with what Sarita Sar-vate wrote (“Annoyed by the Self-help Cult? You Are Not Alone!” India Cur-rents, October 2015). Well, maybe not all of it, but a large part of it. People in these scenes have indeed become very narcis-sistic, blaming others for where they are. The law of attraction is about the worst thing ever, blaming and shaming people for their circumstances. I’d suggest people go watch the movie Humans on You Tube for a rather large wake up call as to what is actually happening in the world and get over their entitled western atitude.

Pippa Galea, website

I know the article by Sarita Sarvate is an opinion piece, but it seems to me that her research is somewhat short. The self-help industry is a billion dollar one and gets a lot of credit for contributing to people’s success. One of the biggest messages you find in the field is the very message Ms. Sarvate subscribes to: Go out and be of service to others. As opposed to sit on the sidelines and criticize.

Andre Darling, website


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something like the cognitive dissonance I experience listening to my two year old singing Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” “I’m keeping my baaa-by!” she announced recently, to her grandfa-ther’s considerable surprise.)

Of course, my own childhood love affair with “Rasputin” was not singular. Rather, it seems to reflect a broader civilizational preoccupation. In 1994, Bollywood film composers Jatin-Lalit lifted whole musical phrases from “Rasputin” for the song “Sa-chi Yeh Kahani Hai” in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. Then, in 2012, Pritam explicitly borrowed from “Rasputin” in writing “Steal the Night (I’ll Do the Talking)” for Agent Vinod. So I’m not surprised when “Rasputin” begins to play in T. Nagar. It’s sim-ply another notch in globalization’s belt, a confirmation of the interconnections we have been living all our lives, of the curious tastes that transcend generations, and of the marginal histories we each carry unawares.

Here I am in 2015: a California-born Indian American in a British pub in Chennai dancing to German pop music based on a Turkish folk song sung by a quartet from the Caribbean islands in 1976.

Later I will discover that the German record producer and songwriter, Frank Farian, who started Boney M. was also re-sponsible for the mid-1990s hits “Be my lover” (by La Bouche), “Tonight is the night” (by Le Click), and “Where do you go” (by No Mercy). If you weren’t between the ages of 10 and 20 in the mid-1990s, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. But if you were, you’ll remember the infectious beats of those ridiculous songs, how they played at the roller palace when you debuted your first pair of roller blades, how alive you felt, how young.

The dance floor at 10 Downing Street is empty until I en-ter it. I am old enough now not to care how I look, so I begin to jump wildly, hands overhead, and sing the familiar lyrics of “Rasputin.” Other pub-goers get comfortable and move to join me—groups of men in their thirties who dance by bumping chests and linking fingers, in a distinctly Indian brand of un-ashamed homosociality. I drift into a corner near the DJ booth. It is not long before Boney M. fades into “Subha Hone Na De” from Desi Boyz, and retro night is officially the stuff of the past.

“This is what I like,” my Chennai-born friend, who has thus far avoided the dance floor, shouts gleefully, as he pumps his fists

in the air. “This is my music. At the end of the day, I’m a desi boy only.” n

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

On a Friday night in Chennai in September 2015, we go with friends to drink gin and eat Jack Daniels chicken at 10 Downing Street. Styled as a British pub, 10 Down-

ing Street is actually #50 B.N. Road—but you can see why they would change the name. It is retro night. Retro here means Michael Jackson and a medley from the musical Grease. It means disco and music videos featuring Afro-ed quartets. It also means the second coming of Boney M., a 1970s pop group that I always assumed was British, but was apparently based in Germany and made up of singers from Aruba, Jamaica, and Montserrat.

“Sunny.” “Daddy Cool.” “Rivers of Babylon.” “Brown Girl in the Ring.” My Michigan-born husband is looking at me like I’m crazy, because I know all these songs. Given the curious way that sonic artifacts travel—first, on radio waves; then in the Scotch-soaked nostalgia of reveling immigrants—these German hits from the mid-1970s actually comprised the soundtrack to my late-1980s/early-1990s, suburban American childhood.

On Friday nights in the Bay Area, before the first dot com boom and before the bust, we would gather: a group of Indian parents in their thirties (they seemed older to us kids), and us American-born kids, second and third generation Indians with California accents, whose ancestors’ roots and routes variously extended through India, England, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, the United States.

Improbably, “Rasputin,” Boney M.’s 1978 disco masterpiece, which borrows heavily from a Turkish folk song, was our collective anthem. “There lived a certain man in Russia long ago / He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow / Most people looked at him with terror and with fear / But to Moscow chicks he was such a lovely dear.”

“Rasputin” narrates the rise and fall of Grigory Rasputin, the peasant lover of the Russian Tsarina, Alexandra Fyodorovna. Rasputin, born the same year as M.K. Gandhi, was purportedly a “holy healer” and “Russia’s greatest love machine” (Boney M.’s words), but his “drinking and lusting and hunger for power” (still Boney M.) eventually earned him enough enemies that he was shot to death in 1916.

Even as children, we knew all the words to the song, but it would be years before we pieced together the full story of the real-life Rasputin’s drinking and lusting, years before we understood the implications of the “ecstasy and fire,” poisoned drinks, illicit affair, rumors, entrapment, and assassination that we’d been sing-ing about since grade school. We must have been quite a sight, the dozen of us four-foot Indian Americans, dropping our voices two octaves and narrowing our eyes to end our spirited dance with a menacing: “Oh, those Russians!” (Perhaps, for our parents, it was

By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

There Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long Agowords and things


perspective

Hello, 911? Someone’s Using 409!

Something has been happening this month. I don’t understand it and I can offer no explanation other than

I must be living in an alternate universe as my kids like to say.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, my daughter went back to college. Over the summer, she had come home and for the most part reverted to her charming way of side-stepping any work. Her timing was always impeccable. If I walked in and saw her swatting flies (on a game in her laptop, of course; nothing really active, come on!) and said, “hey, set the table, will you?” I got the perfect “just” response. “I’m just in the middle of enrolling for classes” or “I’m just applying for a summer job”—those very responses that stop a mom in her tracks and decide she must not interrupt this responsible young adult. Well, my instinct was equally impeccable and I just happened to know that she would rather just be doing anything but use a bit of muscle around the house.

Then she announced she had decided to move off campus. I thought another year on campus would have been more prudent since she knew little about cook-ing and cleaning, paying bills, cleaning, grocery shopping and cleaning. (Did I say cleaning more than once?) But her mind was made up, and the university fortu-itously over-enrolled freshmen, so upper-classmen were essentially booted out to fend for themselves. She and her friends found themselves a nice apartment off campus, and it was probably shortly after that I must have hit my head and had a bad concussion, because nothing has made sense since then.

There was a predictable flurry of shop-ping for a bed, a desk, and some other essentials. Then she started asking for bakeware. “I like to make scones,” she declared. “In fact, it would be best if I got a muffin pan and a bundt pan too, since I like cakes.” Pots and pans came next. I also got a taste of what rooming together in the digital age looks like. It

seemed we could go nowhere without room-mate input. Every time we stood in front of household goods at any store, the phone was whipped out and conversations flew back and forth. “Did you buy a can opener? Ok, I’ll get the egg whisks then. What do you think about these matching storage jars <click, send>?”

The weekend came when she decided to move in before her roommates did, so she could get comfortable in her sur-roundings and find her way to Safeway (no mean feat in her city since you can trip over three organic food stores and four pot shops within 500 feet, even buy a mandala or two, but you have to take three buses to get to Safeway!) That weekend I swung between applauding her independence and thinking about episodes of Criminal Minds that had the general theme “Sh-emar Moore sexily chases evil serial killer who stalked young women walking to Safeway.” Then the first text arrived … “can you send me your cauliflower recipe and your vendakkai (okra) recipe?” I threw myself on the floor and wept with happi-ness. She was alive! And more importantly, much, much more importantly, someone wanted an Indian recipe from me! Heck, everyone knows Indian cooking is not my forte. I was clearly approaching some sort of Tamilian mami-hood.

Now you should know that in my house, the food ranges from sambhar to bratwurst (sometimes on the same day, if the two countries reach an impasse!). So why did she not buy ready-to-eat brat-wurst at Safeway? Comfort food, it seems,

By Gayatri Subramaniam

comes in a container of dal. Pictures came next. “Look, I made ghee so I could have it with dal.” And then, this is when I was certain I must have had a concussion. She said, “I don’t understand it. I have had this compulsive need to clean the kitchen. I even bought some 409 and scrubbed the hood of the stove.”

“I’m sorry,” I said sadly, “you must have the wrong number. I don’t know you.”

The impostor didn’t stop there. Last weekend, the campus filled with the room-mates and other friends, as classes began. She called again, to tell me that one of her friends tumbled in that morning, bleed-ing and moaning, after he had fallen off a skateboard and kissed the concrete with his entire face. The domestic goddess child turned into a nurse as she apparently hand-ed him an ice-pack, and found some gauze to bandage his elbows, while the other roommates stared horrified. And then as they pondered where to find medical help on a Saturday, she said with authority in her voice, “What insurance do you have?” When she found that he had the same insurance we did, she directed him and his girlfriend to the appropriate clinic. And then she cleaned and disinfected the house.

I hung up again with, “sorry, I really don’t know you.” What I know is that my child hates the sight of blood, and used to leave the house when we had to remove a splinter from her younger sister’s hand. And I swear she knows nothing about insurance! I don’t know who’s taken over her phone and identity, but that girl has some pretty good recipes now and it’s time for her to leave us alone.

Have you seen my daughter? If you find her, will you tell her that her mother misses her and she can come home to the old universe, and all will be forgiven? n

Gayatri Subramaniam is a pre-licensed Mar-riage and Family Therapist in Silicon Valley. She moonlights as a writer when the whim strikes her.

Now you should know that in my house, the food ranges from sambhar to bratwurst (sometimes on the same day, if the two countries reach an im-passe!).


cover

By Ritu Marwah

“Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon.”–Dina’s mother, Ruttie, wrote to Jinnah, her husband.

Muhammad Jinnah, Dina Jinnah, Ruttie Jinnah; Photos courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi


Dina was born on the night be-tween 14th and 15th August, 1919. She made a dramatic en-

try into the world, announcing her ar-rival when her parents were enjoying a movie at a local theatre in London. Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan re-cords: “Oddly enough, precisely twenty-eight years to the day and hour before the birth of Jinnah’s other offspring, Pakistan.”

When Dina was introduced to Nev-ille Wadia she was 17 years old. The year was 1936.

Neville was born to a Parsee father and a Christian mother. His father Sir Ness Wadia was a well known textile industrialist in India. Neville was born in Liverpool, England and educated at Malvern College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Mahommedali Currim Cha-gla, who was Jinnah’s assistant at the time, writes in his autobiography Roses in December: “Jinnah asked Dina ‘there are millions of Muslim boys in India, is he the only one you were waiting for?’ and Dina replied ‘there were millions of Muslim girls in India, why did you marry my mother then?’”

Jinnah and Ruttie Jinnah, you see, was no stranger to

love. We learn about Ruttie and Jinnah from Khwaja Razi Haider’s book Ruttie Jinnah: The Story Told And Untold. Twen-ty years after the death of his first wife, Jinnah had turned to mush in the arms of 16 year-old Ruttie, Dina’s mother-to-be, and a Zoroastrian to boot. They wanted a civil marriage and the law at the time stated that you had to foreswear religion to get married in court. Haider explains that this meant Jinnah had to

Nehru and Jinnah had the same problem. Their daughters loved men they did not approve of.

Children of ambitious fathers, Indira and Dina, both, carried their fathers’ hopes and lived with their mothers’ pain. They were daughters who were raised in the mold of the young English ladies their fathers had gone to school with. Jinnah’s daughter, Dina was born in Britain and, like Indira, went to school there.

What the girls did not know was that it was all fine and dandy to wear modern ideas but you don’t go to bed in them. Both girls crossed the line and fell in love with men of another faith.

resign his Muslim seat in the Imperial Legislative Council. Ruttie solved the problem by embracing Islam and mar-rying Jinnah. Love that had blossomed while horse-riding in Darjeeling was sealed with a forbidden kiss.

Ruttie’s father, Sir Dinshaw Petit, a textile magnate and Jinnah’s client was horrified that his only child was mar-rying Jinnah, a man of another faith, and had forbidden them from meeting each other. Sir Dinshaw went to court and got a restraining order. The couple had to wait for two years before Ruttie reached legal age and was able to marry Jinnah and leave her parental home.

It was love’s early days. According to Haider, when Jinnah, or J as she called him, worked in stuffy offices, with stuffy men, discussing stuffy things, Ruttie, the flower of Bombay, waited patiently in the musty rooms of courts of law. She traveled with Jinnah to meetings includ-ing the Congress session in Nagpur and spoke vociferously in favor of Hindu-Muslim unity in the face of the colonial enemy Britain.

Jinnah admired and indulged Ruttie. Haider shares an interesting anecdote of

Sharing a jovial moment: Jinnah with Gandhi; Photo courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi


tactics, took a back seat. The family immersed themselves in the Parsee com-munity. Professor Akbar S. Ahmed in

his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity, records how the family traveled through Europe and dined with friends at Savoy and Berkeley during that time.

Gandhi was jailed in March 1922. Ruttie and Dina saw Jinnah throw himself into the 1923 November Central Leg-islative Assembly elections to their neglect. Jinnah fought for adequate representation of the Muslim legislative assemblies even as Gandhi was released from jail.

Haider details how, at home, Ruttie, and nine-year-old Dina took a back seat in Jinnah’s life and for Ruttie the psychological stress caused coli-tis to flare up. They moved out of the house in 1928 to the Taj Mahal Hotel. Jinnah accepted his role in the failing marriage,

“It is my fault: we both need some sort

of understand-ing we cannot give.” [Haider]

“Mrs. Jinnah had already sailed for Eu-

rope, with her parents, when her hus-band left Bombay in April 1928; his political career in dark confusion, and his one experiment in private happi-ness apparently wrecked for ever,” writes Hector Bolitho in the official biography called Jinnah. It is from Bolitho we learn that Diwan Chaman Lall, a colleague and friend took a voyage to England, and after the voyage declared, “he is the loneliest man.”

Soon after the ship arrived in Eng-land, Jinnah went to Ireland, and Diwan Chaman Lall to Paris where Ruttie and Dina were staying. Chaman Lall had been in his hotel only a few minutes when he learned that Ruttie was in a hospital, dangerously ill.

He described the story to Bolitho, “I went to the hospital immediately. I had always admired Ruttie Jinnah so much: there is not a woman in the world today to hold a candle to her for beauty and charm. She was a lovely, spoiled child, and Jinnah was inherently incapable of understanding her. She was lying in bed,

their dinner at the Government House. The story goes, Mrs. Jinnah wore a low-cut dress. While they were seated at the dining table, Lady Willingdon, Marie Free-man-Thomas, Marchioness of Willingdon asked an aide-de-camp (ADC) to bring a wrap for Mrs. Jinnah, in case she felt cold. Jinnah rose from the ta-ble, and declared, “When Mrs. Jinnah feels cold, she will say so, and ask for a wrap herself.” Then he led his wife from the dining-room; and from that time on refused to go to Gov-ernment House again.

A Precarious BalanceHowever, real life has a

way of sneaking up. The first few years of Jinnah’s marriage to Ruttie also coincided with challenging times at work. Gandhi returned to India and his political tactics were dif-ferent from those of Jinnah’s constitutional ones.

During the second and third year of his marriage, Jinnah was forced to make three remarkable decisions that reduced his role in India’s freedom struggle: he resigned from the Impe-rial Legislative Council, the Home Rule League and Indian National Congress. The graph of Jinnah’s career showed an increasingly downward trend. During the 1920 session of Congress, with Rut-tie by his side, Jinnah saw Gandhi hijack the movement. As opposed to Jinnah’s constitutional ways, says Jaswant Singh in his book India, Pakistan Independence, Gandhi was taking the movement to the streets with chaotic demands like Purna Swaraj (complete self rule). “Your way is the wrong way: my way is the right way—the constitutional way is the right way,” Jinnah had said to Gandhi. Jinnah parted ways with the Congress. He held no public office except for his member-ship of the Muslim League. Moved from the national stage, Jinnah now had a smaller platform to stand on.

Dina was a year old when India veered in the direction of non-coop-eration and civil disobedience and her father, Jinnah, disagreeing with Gandhi’s

Dina Jinnah marries Neville Wadia, All Saints’ Church Bombay 1938


S. S. Rajputana,Marseilles 5 Oct 1928

Darling thank you for all you have done. If ever in my bearing your once tuned senses found any ir-ritability or unkindness, be assured that in my heart there was place only for a great tenderness and a greater pain - a pain my love without hurt. When one has been as near to the reality of Life (which after all is Death) as I have been dearest, one only remembers the beautiful and tender moments and all the rest becomes a half veiled mist of unrealities. Try and remember me my beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon.

I have suffered much sweetheart because I have loved much. The measure of my agony has been in accord to the measure of my love.

Darling I love you, I love you - and had I loved you just a little less I might have remained with you only after one has created a very beautiful blossom one does not drag it through the mire. The higher you set your ideal the lower it falls.

I have loved you my darling as it is given to few men to be loved. I only beseech you that tragedy which commenced in love should also end with it.


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with a temperature of 106 degrees. She could barely move, but she held a book in her hand and she gave it to me. ‘Read it to me, Cham,’ she said. It was a vol-ume of Oscar Wilde’s poems.

A few days later Jinnah arrived from Ireland. I waited in the hospital while he went in to see her—two and half hours he was with her. When he came out of her bedroom, he said ‘I think we can save her … I am sure she will pull through.’ Ruttie Jinnah recovered and I left Paris, soon afterwards, for Canada, believing they were reconciled. Some weeks passed, and I was in Paris again. I spent a day with Jinnah, wondering why he was alone. In the evening, I said to him, ‘Where is Ruttie?’ He answered ‘We quarreled: she has gone back to Bom-bay.’ He said it with such finality that I dare not ask any more.”

Jinnah found it difficult to maintain his position at the national level given Gandhi’s arrival and rapid ascendancy. In 1928, Motilal Nehru presented the Nehru Report in Calcutta and and came out squarely on the side of Gandhi. Jin-nah sensed an unmatchable opponent. He spoke about the danger of ignoring the insecurities of the minorities. As he left, he said to Jamshed Nusserwanjee, “Jamshed, this is the parting of the ways.” [Jaswant Singh]

“Dina, however, maintained that Ruttie died of colitis or something more complicated, but it certainly was a diges-tive disorder. The disease caused Ruttie excruciating pain towards the end. At one stage, an overdose almost killed her, and even suggested to some people that she had attempted suicide,” wrote Akbar Ahmed in his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity. While Jinnah was preoc-cupied with work troubles, Ruttie lay in the Taj Mahal Hotel with a broken heart.

Dina watched her mother’s life ebb away. Two months later she died—not yet twenty-nine years old.

Jinnah sat in the burial ceremony with Kanji Dwarkadas beside him. He talked of his political worries even as her body was lowered into the ground. He broke out his reverie when asked to throw a handful of earth. The finality of it hit him. As the idea of a new country birthed in his frustrated mind, his love left him to inhabit another world. He had been check-mated both by his po-

litical rivals and his lover. Ten-year-old Dina watched her father crumble to the ground as he wept uncontrollably. “Rut-tie’s death devastated Jinnah, according to Dina … A curtain fell over him, said Dina,” writes Akbar Ahmed.

Motherless Dina left for England with her father who had decided to abandon politics and settle in London along with his sister, Fatima. “I felt so

utterly helpless,” said Jinnah, to the stu-dents of Aligarh eight years later, about his exit of 1931, recounts Akbar Ahmed.

Grey WolfThey moved into West Heath House

in Hampstead, a three story villa built in the style of the 1880s with a tall tower which gave a splendid view over the surrounding country. Stanley Wolpert in To Charisma and Commitment in South Asian History writes about Dina and Jin-nah’s time in London. “Dina would have morning tea with her father, sitting at the edge of his bed. Breakfast was sharp at nine o’clock. Bradbury, the chauffer took Jinnah to his chambers in King’s Bench Walk thereafter. On Saturdays and Sundays they walked on the Heath to Kenwood-past Jack Straw’s Castle, the inn where Karl Marx had sat drinking root beer with his daughter.”

One day, home for the holidays from her English school, Dina came down for breakfast to find her father engrossed in, a book by H.C. Armstrong on Kemal Ataturk called The Grey Wolf, an Intimate Study of a Dictator. As thirteen-year-old

Dina reached for the toast, Jinnah hand-ed her the book, “Read this, my dear,” he said, “It’s good.” For days on end he talked about Kemal Ataturk. So im-pressed was he by him that Dina named him Grey Wolf.

Like any teenager, she loved to tease her father. She lightened his dark days. Dina did not realize her idyllic time with her father was coming to an end as the grey wolf was rising within him, calling him back to birth another child. “Away with dreams and shadows! They have cost us dear in the past,” Mustafa Kemal seemed to whisper in Jinnah’s ear. In 1933 Jinnah returned to India. The Hampstead home, where the Grey Wolf had lived, was sold. Dina went to live with her mother’s relatives in Bombay. [Wolpert]

The Muslim Identity

Young Muslim graduates thronged to Jinnah as their leader. Rising on the wave of their adoration Jinnah finally saw the world he had wanted all along and he was not willing to risk it for any ideals. Gone was the man who had stood up for his wife’s low cut blouse. In his place was a man who, Akbar Ahmed wrote in his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity, when visiting Baluchi tribes, agreed with his host that it would not be wise for his sister, Fatima, who did not wear a purdah, to go before the more traditional Baluchi tribesmen. He scolded his hostess when she protested “You are trying to ruin four years of building up sympathy for the Muslim League among the tribesmen,” he said. Later in his Presidential address Jinnah would say, “Women can do a great deal within their home, even under purdah.

As Jinnah basked in the adoration of the Muslim masses and nurtured the idea of birthing a country, nineteen-year-old Dina spent more and more time with her mother’s family and the Parsee com-munity. She turned to someone who was older than her and carried her mother’s spirit. She had found, it seemed, a com-bination of her parents, a lively, Parsee gentleman eight years her senior who had grown up, like her, in England—Neville Wadia.

Ruttie had been the only daughter of a textile magnate. And fatefully, Dina who had been 14 years of age when her

Dina WadiaPhoto courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi



mother died, married Neville Wadia, a textile magnate, within five years of her mother’s death. Neville Wadia would one day succeed his father as chair-man of one of India’s successful tex-tile concerns, Bombay Dyeing.

Marriage and Estrangement Jinnah was livid that his daughter

had not chosen a Muslim husband. Dina married Neville in 1938 against her father’s wishes, writes Chagla. In 1939 Jinnah pulled down the house of memories in Mount Pleasant Road and built a mansion. Jinnah asked for “a big reception room, a big veran-dah, and big lawns for garden par-ties,” recalled the architect Claude Batley as related by Akbar Ahmed. The new mansion with its wide balconies, broad high rooms, marble portico leading to the marble terrace was fit for the great leader that he was work-ing to become. On his 64th birthday Jinnah moved in. This house, a perfect backdrop for the future Quaid-i-Azam (the great leader) was not frequented by Dina. According to Chagla, Jinnah had disowned his daughter.

Dina and Neville had two children, a daughter and then a son. But Dina, like her mother, Ruttie, proved to be unlucky in love. Within five years of her marriage, she left Neville. They got sepa-rated in 1943, though the divorce never took place.

On July 20, 1943, an assassin entered the house with a knife to kill Jinnah, but was overpowered. Contrary to what Chagla wrote, Dina telephoned and then rushed to the house to see her father, writes Akbar Ahmed in Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity. In 1943 Jinnah became seriously ill and had to take a vacation in Srinagar to recover from an ailment in his lungs. As time passed Jin-nah’s temper got shorter and his aloof-ness grew. He focused single-mindedly on the negotiations with the Congress and the British to ensure the creation of Pakistan. “There is the petulance that goes with such illness as Jinnah was suf-fering from,” said his doctor Dr. Patel. [Ahmed]

Papa DarlingJinnah succeeded in his fight for a

separate homeland for the Muslims of India. Akbar Ahmed reveals that on

hearing the news about Pakistan on 28th April 1947, even though she herself had no intention of moving to the new coun-try, Dina wrote to her father.

“My darling Papa, First of all I must congratulate you-we

have got Pakistan, that is to say the prin-cipal has been accepted. I am so proud and happy for you-how hard you have worked for it.

I do hope you are keeping well–I get lots of news of you from the newspapers. The children are just recovering from whooping cough, it will take another month yet.” She ended the letter with “Take care of yourself Papa darling. Lots of love & kisses”

She wrote to him again in June 1947 from Juhu:

“Papa darling,At this minute your must be with the

Viceroy. I must say that it is wonderful what you have achieved in these last few years and I feel so proud and happy for you. You have been the only man in India of late who has been a realist and a honest and brilliant tactician-this letter is beginning to sound like a fan mail, isn’t it? “

She again ended with “Take care of yourself. Lots of love & kisses and a big hug.”

Jinnah was seventy-year-old when he boarded the plane on August 7, 1947 and flew to Karachi forever as the Governor General and Baba-i-Qaum of his new born child, Pakistan. As he stepped onto the aircraft, Quaid-i-Azam looked back towards the city in which he was leav-ing behind forever his beloved Ruttie, whose grave he had visited the previous evening; their daughter Dina; a grand-

daughter, a four-year-old grandson, Nusli holding on to his grandfather’s hat; and a house on the hill. [Haider]

He said, “I suppose this is the last time I’ll be looking at Delhi.” [Akbar Ahmed]

He bade a final goodbye with a smile on his face. She would not go to her father’s new home with him and he would die in a year’s time. His lungs, riddled with tuberculosis, finally caught up with him.

Jinnah visited Ruttie’s grave a day before he left India forever. Dina did not travel to Pakistan until her father’s funeral in Karachi in Septem-ber 1948. Their relationship would become a matter of legal conjecture and hair splitting. [Wiki]Dina’s son, Nusli Wadia, became a

Christian, but converted back to Zoro-astrianism and settled in the industrially wealthy Parsee community of Mumbai. He is the chairman and majority owner of Bombay Dyeing, chairman of the Wadia group, and one of the savviest businessmen of India. The Economic Times described Nusli Wadia as “the epitome of South Bombay’s old money and genteel respectability”. He has two sons Ness and Jeh.

Dina is ninety-nine years old and lives in New York with her daughter. Dina’s daughter-in-law, Maureen said to Mumbaiwala about her, “I think she’s a true New Yorker and she’s doing very well. She knows when the Bloomingdale sales are on, and she’ll tell you when to go down to Saks. We all make it a point to go and see her at least once every two months. When the weather is good in summer, we spend at least a couple of months with her. Nusli visits her very frequently.”

Dina fought for her inheritance, the Jinnah House in Mumbai but she never fought for a place in history. Pakistan, her sibling, does not recognize her, just as she never accepted the entity who stole her childhood and her mother’s life. n

Ritu Marwah has pursued theater, writing, marketing, startup management, raising children, coaching debate and hiking. Ritu has a master’s degree in business and worked in London for the Tata group for ten years. Ritu is social media editor at India Cur-rents.

Nehru, Mountbatten and Jinnah working on the Partition Plan along with Lord Ismay, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff;



Why did Dina and Indira marry the men they did? I think In-dira speaks for both of them

when she says of her mother, “I saw her being hurt and I was determined not to be hurt.” Their choice of husbands may not have been politically wise, as per their fathers, but both chose men their mothers would have been safe with. It falls on daughters to right the wrong done to their mothers. The girls crossed their father’s line and fell in love with men of another faith and yet stayed within their mothers’.

Dina was two years old when Indira was born in November 1917. Like Dina Indira too would grow up with a young mother who had frequent bouts of sick-ness. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru who later became the first Prime Minister of independent India, like Jinnah, was often away, directing political activities or being incarcerated in prison, while her mother, Kamala, was frequently bed-ridden with illness, and later suffered an early death from tuberculosis.

Nehru was a Kashmiri Brahmin who, like Jinnah, had gone to school in Eng-land and trained to be a barrister. Upon his return to India, he enrolled at the Al-lahabad High Court, and was mentored into national politics by his father Moti-lal Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru, though, did not marry for love.

Seventeen-year-old Kamala was a match arranged by the family. Unlike Ruttie Jinnah, Kamala was a quiet girl who spoke no English. In his autobiog-raphy, Jawaharlal Nehru, referring to his wife, stated “I almost overlooked her.” Later, as recorded by Pupul Jayakar in her biography of Indira, Kamala would write, “I am not worthy of anyone’s love.”

Like Dina, Indira grew up watching the strange marriage of her parents and her mother’s pain. She scolded her father in her letters, “Do you know that when Mummie was in a very bad condition the house was full of people but not one of them came to see her or sit a while with her ?”

When Indira was sixteen, much to her horror, her grandmother thought it was time to suggest suitable Kashmir Brahmin suitors to her. Indira wrote “I wept and wept because I was so terrified at the very idea of marriage.” At that time Feroze, who was almost a part of the household, showed interest in Indira.

Feroze Jehangir Ghandy was born to a Parsi family. He met Indira and Kamala in 1930 during a protest march by a wing of Congress Freedom Fight-ers, the Vanar Sena. Indira and her mother Kamala were among the women demonstrators picketing outside Ewing Christian College. Kamala fainted due to the heat of the sun and Feroze went to comfort her. In the subsequent years Feroze was a big support to Kamala and tended to her when she became irrecov-erably sick.

Kamla along with Indira, like Ruttie, went to Europe for treatment and there was hope that she would recover but the will to live comes from a fulfilled life. Kamala was thirty-seven years old when she died. At that time Indira was eighteen.

It was about the same time that Jin-nah sold the house in Hampstead and

moved to India with Dina, that Nehru returned to India after the death of Kamala. Jinnah set about the task of be-coming Quaid-i-Azam and establishing a new country, and Nehru got elected as President of Congress and became the Veer (brave) who would establish ramrajya (Kingdom of Rama, an idyllic world).

Motherless and neglected, Indira and Dina both lost their fathers to the na-tional movement at a time when one was eighteen and the other sixteen years of age. When Indira wrote, “for I am lonely too–terribly lonely,” it could very well have been Dina writing it. Both carried the loneliness of their mothers in their hearts and sought to fill it by mar-rying a person their mother would have approved of.

Pupul Jayakar hints that Indira was maybe in love with her German teacher whom she had met during her time at Shanti Niketan. When it came to mar-riage however, she agreed to marry Fero-ze, her mother’s constant companion. According to some accounts, Indira and Feroze married in London but their mar-riage was again formalized in Allahabad with Vedic rites.

Indira’s father Jawaharlal Nehru had opposed her marriage and approached Mahatma Gandhi to dissuade the young couple, but to no avail.

Like Dina and Neville, Indira and Feroze had a wonderful five years of marriage and birthed two children and then it all fell apart. Indira parted with Feroze, a man she had fought the entire world to marry. However, unlike Dina, Indira joined her father and became his successor.

Feroze died in 1960 leaving behind two sons, Rajiv and Sanjiv. Rajiv would soon follow his mother’s footsteps and become prime minister. Sanjiv or San-jay died in an accident. Indira herself lived up to the age of sixty-seven, her life abruptly cut short by her assassin bodyguards.

If she had lived she would have been 97 years of age today. n

Indira’s Journey

Indira Gandhi; A wiki image


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By P. Mahadevan

Scarcity, in general, steals mental ca-pacity from those in need just like poverty impairs the ability to make

sound decisions. If the mind is focused on one thing, other abilities and skills—at-tention, self control, reasoning ability also suffer.

The poor are poor not because they make bad decisions but bad decisions are made because they are poor. So believes Sendhil Mullainathan, a tenured profes-sor of economics at the Kennedy School, Harvard University who noticed critical changes in his own parents when faced with scarcity. Mullainathan’s father emi-grated from India to work as an aerospace engineer in the United States in the 80s and found himself disqualified to continue in the same field of work because of se-curity classification requirements of the defense industry. As reported in Harvard Magazine, “‘This was the first time I felt real economic insecurity,’ Mullainathan remembers. It was also the first time he saw scarcity’s effects in action.” Mullaina-than goes on to elaborate that he saw his parents change when his father could not get a job. “They were much more stressed out and short-tempered, as if part of their personalities was different.”

According to Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, who did extensive research on the problem, behavioral patterns of scarcity can be seen in situations where people are cash strapped, experiencing fewer oppor-tunities because of their race or perform-ing poorly in school.

In some cases, once you enter condi-tions of scarcity, it is very difficult to escape them, especially in our current society.

The Spiral of Scarcity Take the case of pay day lending (PDL)

schemes. It is estimated that there are over 23,000 such lenders registered in the country, exceeding the combined total of all the McDonalds and Starbucks fast food outlets. They provide “quick and easy” cash in exchange for payroll checks for those who do not have bank accounts. The cash paid out is, after deducting a

commission and an upfront discount, at least a few percentage points less than the check amount. Every payroll check, in ef-fect, becomes a short term loan deed with stiff interest rates, penalties and the like. The payback period could be as short as a week or two. If the full amount is not paid back, the balance due obviously car-ries higher interest and penalties. In effect, every transaction of this type is a turnstile for debt. The borrower builds his own perpetual debt trap. The cumulative inter-est charged can exceed 400 percent.

Unlike the United States, most coun-tries, large and small have postal savings banks available at very low cost for those who cannot afford the costs of commercial banking. In this way, the United States is unique in how it deals with banking opportunities for the poor. This is an-other skillfully built-in security blanket for regular banks to operate with minimum competition. It is estimated that about 12 million Americans are trapped in the pay day loan sink. Very few states have any meaningful control on this problem.

Escaping the Scarcity TrapSeveral leaders have tried to redefine

policies to help people in situations of scarcity. In a panel discussion on race and poverty in America recently, President Obama briefly traced attempts to tackle the problem in recent American history, starting with President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” slogan of the sixties to President Clinton’s “make work pay” for low income families. There was a size-able fall in poverty rates during President Clinton’s term of office. The situation has worsened since then. President Obama has been making a case for the channeling of resources toward education and infrastruc-ture in chronically poor communities in the country. This, in his estimation, would provide options for escaping the scarcity trap.

Education and PovertyShortfalls in scholastic achievements

in the K-12 public schools in the United

States is a hot topic in the blame game series. A contrarian analysis was presented by the screen-writer, actor, director and movie producer, M. Night Shyamalan. He came up with the astounding conclusion that “American schools are not failing.” His findings are presented in the book I Got Schooled. Shyamalan found a key poverty link to the analysis of the data col-lected from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). This inter-national test for achievement evaluation is given to fifteen year olds every three years. Demographics show that about 20 percent of the United States student body comes from inner city schools. They come from low income families at poverty levels exceeding ten percent. This segment of students bring the rankings to unaccept-ably low levels.

The reason for this is that a large per-cent of these inner city school students are hungry all day long. They cannot be motivated to achieve anything unless the root problem is solved. It is a shame that the richest country in the world faces hunger in this abysmal way. It also goes to prove Mullainathan’s postulate that much is known about the economics of poverty and far less of the “psychology it creates in individual populations.”

It is interesting to note that the prob-lem of scarcity as well as the topic of scar-city is a much researched one. Recently the Nobel committee awarded the economics prize for 2015 to Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University for his work on the toll of scarcity on various demograph-ics. This recognition is the second one given to an economist for working on this same topic in the last two decades: the first went to Amartya Sen in 1998. n

P. Mahadevan is a retired scientist with a Ph.D. in Atomic Physics from the University of London, England. His professional work includes basic and applied research and pro-gram management for the Dept. of Defense. He taught physics at the University of Kerala, at Thiruvananthapuram. He does very little now, very slowly.

science The Toll of Scarcity

18 | INDIA CURRENTS | Southern California | November 2015

“All you had to do was ask. We would have been on that plane together.”

I got up. I made sure Abhay was strapped to the infant’s seat properly and pulled her aside.

“I am sorry.”She moved closer. I breathed in rose

and jasmine. She pulled out the locket of

her necklace from under her black shirt and held it out. It was a red heart I had known intimately in another life.

“What about this promise?”The locket held a grain of rice with

Lola engraved on one side and Raj on the other. It was a promise I hadn’t kept.

“You know how it is with Indian par-ents,” I said. My hands clenched. “You knew everything!”

fiction

atha i tion ontest onora le ention

By Vivek Santhosh

Courage

Lola headed straight for us.

My son and I were seated in the Westfield Mall’s food court. The last time I had seen her was on a cold, depress-ing day at Dulles departures. From then, she had shed every bit of doubt from her gait, walking towards us with the confidence of someone who knew what she was doing. I half got up to greet her, pos-sibly give her a hug.

“Hello, junior Rajesh.” She knelt on the floor and kissed the back of my tod-dler’s palm. She still pronounced my name as ra-zh-ush. I sat back down. It’s ra-jay-sh, baby.

“His name is Abhay,” I said. Cheese was smeared across his right cheek and caked on his arms. The blue bib was squeaky clean.

“Now that’s a name I get,” she said. She puffed up her cheeks. My son gig-gled. He wrapped his mac-n-cheese fingers around her pinky.

“I bet your wife chose it,” she said, looking up. Her eyes glistened with con-tempt.

“Actually, I did.”I fished out Abhay’s dessert from a

green Whole Foods bag. “Wow, it’s been so long, right?”

She stood up and smoothed down her mustard skirt. “Five f***ing years, Rajesh,” she hissed.

I winced at the bowl of thinly sliced apples. To a casual observer—of which there were many in this food court—the fruit had simply oxidized too much.

“You know, you look just as beautiful,” I said. It was true. There was a glint of dia-mond in one ear. I couldn’t see the other, covered by her wavy blonde hair.

“I gave you more than one chance.”“It was a long time ago, Lola.”

“You haven’t changed one bit, have you?”

She noticed my work badge lying on the table beside us and picked it up.

“PreciSoft,” she read. I snatched it from her hand and stuffed it in my pocket. How dare she just show up and rip my peace apart like that?

“Does PreciSoft send its employees to shoot lions in the lower Zambezi?”

“No.” “So how do you manage this and wild-

life photography both?”“I don’t. That never happened.”Lucy took two steps back. She was

incredulous.“That too?” She laughed out.My hands unclenched. Yes, that too.

ow that s a name get she said he ed her heeks y son giggled e wra ed his ma n heese

fingers aro nd her inky et yo r wi e hose it she said looking er

eyes glistened with ontem t

A Creative Commons image by RecoilRick


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Katha 2015 Results

“But that was what you lived for!”I didn’t respond. We stood in silence.

Then, the blaze in her eyes cleared. Some-thing had dawned on her. Something about me. She walked over to Abhay and planted a kiss on the top of his head.

“At least teach your son to stand up for himself.”

And she left, just like she had come, her steps unwavering, purposeful, like she was going somewhere important. Not just that day, in life.

She walked down the aisle to the far end of the food court. Without a break in her stride, she removed the necklace and left it on a vacant table. Then she turned the corner and disappeared. A sudden sad-ness clutched my stomach, wringing from it a certain will. A will to go on.

My son had stopped eating long ago. He held a slice of fruit between his tiny fingers, staring at it in wonderment, ready to see how far it would fly. I decided to clean him up before the wife returned from shopping. Maybe one day he would wield a camera perched on a tree in the Zam-bian wilderness. After all, wasn’t Abhay his name? n

Vivek Santhosh is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was raised in India and Oman. An engineer by profession, he lived in Atlanta and Boston before moving west to Silicon Valley. His first flash fiction piece “Separation” was published by Black Heart Magazine. He is currently working on a col-lection of short stories exploring life in a small town in Kerala, India. When not writing or traveling, he enjoys running and playing Ul-timate Frisbee. You can find more about Vivek and his works at www.viveksanthosh.com.

About the Judges:

Vikram Chandra’s works include Red Earth and Pouring Rain (a novel), Love and Longing in Bombay (collection of short stories, Sacred Games (a novel) and Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty (non-fiction).

Sonia Faleiro is the award-winning author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, acclaimed as one of NPR’s Five Best Travel Memoirs of 2012,

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commentary

Tulip Mania

As a child growing up in India, I spent many enjoyable hours reading

Alexandre Dumas’ 1850 novel titled, The Black Tulip. Although not as popular as his Three Mus-keteers, this novel, especially its obsession about flower-grow-ing, gave free rein to my young imagination. The story concerns itself with a tulip fancier in the Netherlands, passionate about cultivating a rare black variety, and meeting with competition from another grower, another lover of tulip.

The book had other themes, some rather disturbing, such as lynching and imprisonment. I skipped those sections and went to those pages dedicated to the serene, gentle, beloved tulips.

If truth be known, I hadn’t seen a real tulip. In the eastern part of India where I lived with my family, we cultivated roses and jasmine, but tulips were not to be found. I could only recall a picture of the flower, which resembled a rose, its u-shape holding a mystery, as it were. But a black tulip? Does such a shade really exist?

My family and teachers couldn’t answer that question satisfactorily and after a time I forgot all about it. As luck would have it, many years later, as an adult, I went to Holland to work and found myself in tulip country. “It’s our flower,” a Dutch man told me, “plain and simple.” He insisted that although the flower was believed to have originated in the Ottoman Empire, it was the Dutch who have been histori-cally captivated by it. He informed me, somewhat proudly, that the Dutch tulip traders were responsible for bursting the economic bubble in the 17th century (the first such collapse in the world) by con-stantly raising the price of the bulbs.

Might I find a black tulip somewhere? In the organization in Amsterdam where I worked, my colleagues routinely grew tulips and took pride in them. They’d have a friendly competition as to who produced the largest number of tulips, the

biggest, or the most colorful. Everyone was knowledgeable about this topic. Sev-eral colleagues insisted that there existed a deep purple variety that comes closest to Dumas’ coveted black hue, but no one knew for sure where I’d see one. At the end of the year, I left Holland, with mem-ories of visiting many bright tulip fields, but without ever encountering the black shade. The little hunger in me remained.

Tulips didn’t let go of me. Now, many years later, I find myself living in Seattle, where that flower is very much a part of the landscape. In my flower patch, I grow the red and yellow cup-shaped variety. But walking around the neighborhood, I see others: fringed, ruffle-edged, and red-streaked. What Washingtonians feel about azaleas, we (in the other Washing-ton) feel about tulips. Our biggest spring celebration, the Tulip Festival, takes place in Skagit Valley, located north of Seattle. Every April, we, in the Pacific Northwest, brave rainy weather and horrendous traffic to visit Skagit, where more than 700 acres are dedicated to tulips, daffodils, and hya-cinths. We stand before fields blazing with red, yellow, pink or orange colors.

I haven’t encountered the amazing black tulip yet, but I tell myself, I can live with that mystery. n

Bestselling author Bharti Kirchner’s sixth novel Goddess of Fire is due out in early 2016.

By Bharti Kirchner

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tax talk

By Rita Bhayani

Tax On Children’s Investments

• Schedule an appointment to dis-cuss year- end tax planning strate-gies

• If you moved this year, let your tax consultant know so he or she can help you complete Form 8822, Change of Address, and report the change to the IRS.

Does your child have investments, such as interest, dividends, capital gains or other unearned income? If these types of investments are in your child’s name, you should be aware of certain factors that might lead to the investments being taxed at your rate rather than at your child’s rate.

The tax rules state that the child’s tax must be figured using the parents’ rate if the child has investment income of more than $2,100 and meets one of three age requirements:

i) Was under age 18 at the end of the year;

ii) Was age 18 at the end of the year and did not have earned income that was more than half of his or her support; or

iii) Was a full time student over age 18 and under age 24 at the end of the year and did not have earned income that was more than half of his or her support.

If certain conditions are met, you may be able to avoid having to file a tax return for your child by including the child’s income on your tax return. I can help you with these filing requirements.

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.” ~Denis Waitley

Starting in 1987, the IRS required

that taxpayers report the social security number of all dependents over the age of five. (Now there is no age limit; the rule requires all dependents to have a SSN). That year, seven million American children disappeared from the nation’s tax returns, representing a ninepercent drop in the 77 million dependents claimed the previous year and $2.9 billion more in yearly tax revenue. The tax agency said about 20 percent of the vanished dependents were children who had been claimed as dependents by both parents af-ter a divorce. Under the law, only one par-ent may claim the child as a deduction. n

Rita Bhayani is a Certified Public Ac-countant and a Certified Management Ac-countant practicing at Pleasanton, CA and she protects the clients from the IRS. She provides tax planning, accounting, payroll and outsourced CFO services too. For more information log on to www.ritacpa.net. Re-printed with permission from the National Association of Tax Professionals.

Tax on Children’s Investments

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By Indu Liladhar-Hathi

My priority date for my employment based green card is current and I am eligible to file my application to adjust

my status. After filing my application, can I travel to get married, and will my wife be able to accompany me to the United States?

Since you are filing your application to adjust your status (I-485), you can apply for your advance parole

–AP (Travel Authorization), at the same time. You must wait for your AP to be approved prior to departing the United States. If you get married before your ap-plication (I-485) is approved, then your wife is eligible to obtain her green card as your dependent. When you return to the United States, please ensure that you enter on your H-1B/L-1 status so that your wife can enter on her H-4/L-2 status. If you return on your AP then you cannot bring

your wife on H-4/L-2 visa; and your wife will need to wait outside the United States until after your green card is approved and will need to “follow to join” through the U.S Consulate in your home country.

Note: if your application (I-485) is ap-proved before you get married, then your wife will not be able to get the dependent green card. You will need to file a separate petition for her as a spouse of green card holder, which may mean that she will have to wait for about a year or two,

I am on H-4 status and I have received an Employment Authorization Docu-ment (EAD) based on my spouse’s ap-

proved I-140 petition. I heard that the H-4 EAD rule is being challenged in court in the same way as the OPT STEM extension (Granting 17 months of EAD to F-1 STEM students). Please comment.

It is true that the same court (dif-ferent judge) will be reviewing the validity of the H-4 EAD rule that

went into effect in May 2015. Save Jobs USA (a group of former Edison em-ployees who lost their jobs to H-1B visa holders) has filed a lawsuit in April 2015 seeking to stop the H-4 EAD rule, arguing that this rule should have gone through formal legislation (as opposed through regulation).

Note: The H-4 EAD rule underwent proper notice and comment period (un-like the OPT STEM rule). Therefore, it cannot be vacated on that basis, and I am fairly optimistic that the rule will remain intact. n

Immigration and business attorney Indu Li-ladhar-Hathi has an office in San Jose.(408) 453-5335

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This column carries priority dates and other transitional information as taken from the U.S. State Depart ment’s Visa

Bulletin. The information below is from the Visa Bulletin for November 2015.

In the tables below, the listing of a date for any class indicates that the class is over-subscribed. “Current” means that numbers are available for all qualified applicants.

FAMILY PREFERENCE VISA DATES

Preference Dates for India

1st Feb 22, 20082A May 15, 20142B Feb 08, 20093rd Jun 15, 20044th Mar 01, 2003NOTE: F2A numbers subject to per-

country limit are available to applicants beginning with priority dates beginning April 01, 2014 and earlier than May 15, 2014.

EMPLOYMENT-BASEDVISA DATES

Preference Dates for India

1st Current2nd July 01, 20093rd July 01, 2005Other July 01, 2005 Workers4th CurrentCertain Current Religious Workers5th Current Targeted Employment Areas

The Department of State has a recorded message with visa availability information at (202)485-7699, which is updated in the middle of each month. Source: http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bul-letin/2016/visa-bulletin-for-november-2015.html

Important Note: U.S. travelers seeking vi-sas to India will now need to obtain them through Cox & Kings Global Services Pvt. Ltd. Call 1-866-978-0055, email [email protected] or visit www.in.ckgs.us for more information.

November 2015

visa dates

syndicatelegal.com


By Roshn Marwah

sports

Meet Indian Insanity—an over-arching name applied to four new national competitive sports

leagues in India: a collegiate basketball league, a collegiate American football league, a professional basketball league, and a professional American football league.

The name of the game is entertain-ment.

The Philanthropic GameNot entirely so, say the group behind

Indian Insanity who believe that their mis-sion is philanthropic. They seek to help expand and grow the sport while giving Indian children opportunities that they have never had before.

Sunday Zeller, the Co-CEO, said that she initially thought of expanding these sports leagues in Africa, but then came to the realization that India has the infra-structure to support such leagues due to its size and propensity for quick education and quick adoption of western culture. She went on to say that a large part of the organization’s mission is based around creating opportunities for the players and creating avenues through which children, who previously may not have been in a po-sition to attend schools, can be educated.

The group has created the first ever football scholarship and plans to create more sports scholarships. In an attempt to ensure that this success grows and continues they are asking that any college that joins their collegiate leagues, sets aside special resources to help the players get into and through college.

Hoop DreamsThe rise of Satnam Singh and Sim

Bhullar, has put an international spotlight on Indian basketball like never before. The same way Yao Ming and Dikembe Mu-tombo led the expansion of the National Basketball Association (NBA) into China

and Africa and in particular Congo. The new Indian NBA big men, while not yet as great as the two aforementioned players are beginning to spread excitement.

Basketball despite its recent increase in popularity in India is by no means a new sport to the country. The first national tournaments in India came about in 1934 and the Indian national basketball team became a member of FIBA, the Interna-tional Basketball Federation, in 1936. The Indian national team has only qualified for the Olympics in basketball once in 1980, but has placed fourth in the FIBA Asia championship. Currently the Indian national basketball team ranks 61st in the world and 11th in Asia.

Today national level basketball com-petitions are mainly under the governing body called the Basketball Federation of India or BFI. The BFI has for years been attempting to set up a national profes-sional league, but has been utterly unsuc-cessful. The Universal Basketball Alliance University (UBA-U), is the name of the collegiate league that has been set up to serve as a feeder into the Universal Basket-ball Alliance league (UBA).

The professional UBA league consists of eight teams with an expansion into 12 teams occurring in the upcoming season. The current eight existing teams are the Pune Peshwas, the Delhi Capitals, the Haryana Gold, the Punjab Steelers, the Chennai Slam, the Mumbai Challengers, the Bengaluru Beast, and the Hyderabad Sky.

As of right now the league owns all of the teams, however as the league expands the plan is to sell the teams to investors.

According to Zeller, there has been much interest from big Bollywood stars, who wish to purchase teams, but as of right now there is no specific plan as to how to determine sellers. Abhishek Bachchan has been spotted at the UBA’s games. Zeller indicated that prior to the

India’s Sports Leagues


UBA’s arrival into India, there were na-tional leagues, but they played in barns and lacked organization and exposure.

While the UBA does not have an exclu-sive television deal just yet, TEN Sports, Asia’s leading sports network, has been broadcasting their games and is reportedly very interested in striking up an exclusive deal very soon. Currently TEN sports broadcasts the UBA-U’s final eight-team knockout stage of the tournament. A deal with TEN sports would ensure that for the first time in India there will be a televised basketball draft, in which players would be selected from the UBA-U into the UBA.

When looking back at a successful season that ended with the Chennai Slam easily disposing of the Pune Peshwas in the championship with a final score of 81-49, Zeller says that the next big improvement step will be improving the quality of the coaches, and expanding the marketing team.

Touchdown FrenzyUnlike basketball, American football

has never before been present on any type on national level in India. This brings it’s own unique set of challenges to the Elite Football League of India (EFLI), the national competitive American football league and the EFLI-U, the collegiate or university league.

Zeller says of the challenge of educat-ing the Indian population about the rules and how to play football, that the com-pany has been infiltrating into not only schools from elementary to college, but also businesses, stating that many business men have taken to playing football on the weekends.

According to Zeller, the Indian public is very receptive to ideas and trends com-ing from the west, especially America, and that American football is picking up very quickly now that the first couple seasons have come to a close.

The skill level in the EFLI still needs a lot of developing, but shows promise with the establishment of the EFLI-U to serve as a feeder league where players can first develop their skills before playing in the professional leagues.

In addition to the feeder league and training camps, the EFLI had ten thou-sand walk-ons all striving to make the

team, “with the biggest players coming out of Punjab,” says Zeller.

Unlike the UBA, many of the football teams are owned not by the league itself but by investors, both inside of and out-side India. The EFLI is currently made up of 24 teams including teams in Pakistan, with an expansion to 32 teams coming in the future. The league is currently being broadcast on TEN Sports, with the league coming to an exclusive agreement with the network, for free television time over the next five years.

The 2015 Super Bowl had a record number of 114.4 million viewers and is one of the most widely awaited and watched events around the world. It is not news, by any means, that domestic leagues, regardless of the sport, have the ability to grab national attention and to build people around a country into a ju-bilant frenzy.

One of the largest frenzies surrounding American sports is March Madness, the collegiate basketball tournament that cap-tures the attention of millions of viewers and generates billions in revenue. The sin-gle elimination tournament is run through the National Collegiate Athletic Associa-tion (NCAA).

The idea of March Madness is what led to the naming of the Indian sports organi-zation that is taking the country by storm, Indian Insanity.

One of the slogans of the organization is “All India, All the Time.” This slogan is meant to show that all of the players and coaches and infrastructure for the league is Indian, and not simply foreign players playing a foreign sport in India.

The goal of this according to Indian Insanity is to have the Indian public iden-tify with the sport and see it as something that can be a part of their weekly TV watching, their possible future as athletes, and ultimately their identity.

The league states that they are taking a grass roots approach to spreading the game, by sending players out into the pub-lic in order to spread the game as a way of demonstrating public loyalty and unity. n

Roshn Marwah is a longtime Bay Area sports fan and is majoring in economics and com-puter science at Purdue University. He can be reached at [email protected].


I believe the choice of a name is every man’s birthright. Yet a label is foisted on us even before we have learned to agree or dissent. When I tried to trace the root of the English word

“name,” I discovered that the word shared common ancestry in several ancient tongues: nama in Old English; namo in Old High German; nomen in Latin; onoma in Greek; naman in Sanskrit; and namam in Tamil.

What I found more intriguing than the origin of the word it-self was the punch packed into the “name” that we’re each assigned at birth. The sound of my name is one of the first sounds I heard as my ears tuned to the world, as my eyes focused on life. Little do we ponder this, but unless one is James Bond, our name is also the word we will spell the most of any word through the course our lives. It’s the invisible unique RFID (radio frequency identification) tag that will cause us to swell with pride, sometimes, and dwell in discomfort at other times.

Even today, the sound of my name called out in public recalls trepid mo-ments from my distant and recent past: an unmentionable grade an-nounced by my physics teacher and my solemn recognition that while all free-falling objects had a gravity of 9.8 m/s², my grade, given its nonexistent mass, accelerated faster towards the earth; the dour look of the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles when I had failed my driving test a second time and kept insisting to the clerk—even as she and I knew deep inside that I may not have pressed the clutch—that my rotten Mazda stick shift always groaned when I shifted gears; the chirpy call and greeting from a nurse at my yearly physical as she handed me the urine cup and I realized that my bladder didn’t have even a drop to drown an ant.

Thus, the uttering of my name can be a knell sometimes and, naturally, during a recent return from Germany, I started when an Airline agent called out my name into the PA system. I had already checked in. When I walked up to talk to the agent at the counter, she told me it was about the identification tag on my bag, a minor matter. I was relieved.

Like that baggage tag, a person’s name is much more than an identification label. It hints at arrivals. It speaks of transits and transformations, of paths taken and not completed. Stamped on it is also an idea of home, a place of belonging.

The consequences of inheriting a name were obvious on my walking tour through the old Jewish neighborhood of Berlin.

During the Third Reich, everyone was required to prove four generations of German ancestry to qualify as a native German. The Hitler regime sifted, tossed, and trashed Jew-ish names and possessions, thus ensuring that the past could not be stripped away through the name.

Poet Gertrude Stein wrote that “a rose is a rose is a rose.” In her mind, a label had so many feelings associated with it that merely invoking the name excavated all manner of feeling surrounding it. In Hitler’s Germany, Jews bearing

first names of “non-Jewish” origin were required to adopt an additional name: “Israel” for men and “Sara” for women. In the autumn of 1938, all Jewish passports were also stamped with an identifying red letter “J” and by 1941, Jews were forced to wear a yellow six-pointed Star of David on the left side of the coat “as large as the palm of a hand” whenever they alighted in public.

In my mind, the narrative on the many meanings of “name” assumed several forms at Berlin’s Jewish muse-um where architect Daniel Libeskind has designed a memorial conceived

on three axes. On one axis, that of the holocaust, the names of those

murdered is presented with photographs, documents, keep-sakes and stories. A second path, the axis of the exile, listed the names of cities where people were reduced to mere names: Lublin, Warsaw, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen, Auswich, Ravensbrück, Dachau. But on a third axis, that of continu-ity, rose other names, like flight destinations at an airport terminal: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, New York, London, Bombay, Shanghai, Haifa, Rio de Janeiro. These were the names of places to which an oppressed migrant community fled to locate a nest.

Just as I was about to board my flight back to the United States, the agent greeted me with “Hello, Ms. Mohan” even

before I handed her my boarding card. I smiled, surprised that a woman who stared all day at rosters of names had actually re-called my face and my name. n

Kalpana Mohan writes from California’s Sili-con Valley. To read more about her, go to http://kalpanamohan.com.

name, noun. before 900 < a word or a combination of words by which a person, place, or thing, a body or class, or any object of thought is designated, called, or known. < from Sanskrit nama ...

By Kalpana Mohan

The Sound of My NameOn Inglish

en today the so nd o my name alled o t in li re alls tre id moments rom my distant and re ent ast the hir y all and greeting rom a n rse at my yearly hysi al as she handed me the rine and reali ed that my ladder didn t ha e e en a dro to drown an ant



books

DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZA-TIONS–Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead Books, 2015. 226 pages. Hardcover $18.71 and paperback $16.00. )

Grab a pen and paper and try the following two-part thought ex-periment:

i) Write: “Time-traveling back to a snowy day in Denmark of 1812, I met Hans Christian Oersted, who was a close friend of the fairy tale writer Hans Chris-tian Andersen, and who also coined the term Gedankenexperiment, which means ‘thought experiment’ in German.”

ii) Now move the pen to your other hand and write: “It’s more difficult to write this shorter sentence.”

Perhaps the above test of your ambi-dexterity has disabused you of the notion that writing is easy, so easy that an author of fiction can easily switch over to non-fiction or vice versa. If one first knows a writer as a gifted novelist, the bar is set high for that writer’s nonfiction; hence the challenge that this reviewer faced in read-ing Mohsin Hamid’s collection of essays in Discontent and Its Civilizations.

With his novels, Hamid has created cohesive and compelling worlds that the reader inhabits: Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013). While all three novels possess a narrative inventiveness that pulls in the reader, it is The Reluctant Fundamentalist (TRF) that tensely straddles Lahore and New York, and is thus contrapuntal to the “dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London” sprinkled throughout Discontent and Its Civilizations (DaIC)

TRF opens and closes with the pro-tagonist, Changez, in a monologue with an American: Changez is a Princeton-

educated, former investment banker, who has returned from America to his native Pakistan, returned from New York’s clean-shaven and cologned financial seat of power to an uneasy, bearded relationship with the world of the seemingly power-less of Lahore; the American is, perhaps an “undercover assassin” or perhaps just a bulked-up guy listening to the life story of someone who is a “potential terrorist.” And then there’s that dividing beard. This “symbol of [Changez’s shifting] identity” is a conundrum of sorts. In this era when facial hirsutism is the young man’s way of projecting a hip attitude, Changez gen-tly confronts the American on a double-standard: “it is remarkable … the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen.”

DaIC was written by Mohsin Hamid, a bearded, Princeton-educated, former management consultant who grew up in

Lahore and now shuttles between Paki-stan, the United States, and England; and DaIC has been read by critics like myself, “undercover assassins” if you will. More seriously, this serious book has probably been read most by those living in the Eng-lish-speaking world. This world of Euro-American interests is not infrequently at odds with the rest of the world; and read-ers from this Western world have been so-cialized to believe the following definition of terrorism memorably conveyed in TRF: “terrorism … was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniform of soldiers.”

The power of the italicized “not” can be attributed to Changez and/or Hamid. In TRF, the implication of the italicization is tacit and thus a punch in the gut; in DaIC, it is explicitly explored in multiple essays and thus a rebuke of the mind.

The punch is not matched by the re-buke, especially because DaIC is not writ-ten as one cohesive essay, the way V. S. Nai-paul wrote India: A Wounded Civilization. While both books aim high with heavy words like “discontent,” “wounded,” and “civilization,” (and although both books fall short of their “big idea” ambitions), Naipaul’s Wounded Civilization at least has focus. Hamid’s Discontent and Its Civiliza-tions is a stitching together of previously published essays into three parts: “Life,” “Art,” and “Politics.” The introduction (“My Foreign Correspondence”) is well integrated, but the rest of the book makes an unreasonable demand that the reader connect the dots.

The first section, “Life,” is highly read-able and entertaining. The reader learns that in the process of shuttling back and forth between Pakistan and America, Ha-mid lost his Urdu and in the bargain gained the mentorship of esteemed writers

A Fundamental ReluctanceBy Rajesh C. Oza


of the English language. There is also a touching piece about how Lahore’s mem-bers of the opposite sex do not touch in public. And there is a powerful piece about the ever-growing gulf between America and Pakistan. Titled “The Countdown,” this essay was published in The New York Times shortly after the Taliban-inspired tragedy of 9/11. While the violence of that day at New York’s World Trade Center and elsewhere has been seared into the Ameri-can psyche, what Hamid does through the frightened eyes of his mother in Pakistan, is to re-frame the conversation: “‘I have complete sympathy for the Americans,’ she says. ‘It is terrible what happened. But now they are so angry. They talk about a war on terrorism. But they never seem to think what they do terrifies normal people here.’”

Some 160 pages later, in “Politics,” there is a less personal and more polemic piece titled “Why Drones Don’t Help.” While this second piece does raise “grave doubts about the legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan,” there’s so much in between the two essays that the power of Hamid’s mother’s plaintive words is lost.

“Art,” the middle section of the book, is delightful, but it could have been dropped altogether, except for a powerful reflec-tion on how The Reluctant Fundamentalist evolved from an early pre-9/11 draft to the final version that was published some six years after the World Trade towers fell. Hamid writes of his split American and Pakistani selves in a way that moves any-one who pledges allegiance to more than one land: “People often ask me if I am the book’s protagonist. I wonder why they never ask me if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.”

In some ways, DaIC has a classic five-paragraph framework, but it lacks a conclusive final paragraph. Whether by design or by omission, this enables (or re-quires) the reader to do his/her own sense-making. Perhaps that is the “co-creation” that is central to Mohsin Hamid’s fiction and politics, that is central to his hope of “people coming together to invent a world that is post-civilization and hence infinitely more civilized.” n

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desi voices

House #152

It was their magnum opus. She didn’t major in the creative arts. Fresh out of high school she was tossed on stage,

with her composer. Mom seemed to have it all under

control. The master conductor, she did the planning, strategizing, and delegation. Dad worked hard on financing the team, setting the broad goals, his third eye al-ways on the budget and silently cheering from the sidelines. Us four, we were no symphony orchestra. The total was fluid—six, plus one or two cousins who boarded with us at various times, a grandchild or two. We had a riot of a time.

The road is narrow, with houses packed on either side; each two stories high. The only greenery in sight is an occasional jackfruit or sampige tree lending its draft of strong fragrance to the summer breeze. Children are enthralled in a gripping game of street cricket, dodging cars, bikes, street vendors and many walkers. On this sweltering hot day, windows open, you can hear the neighbors whisper. As for us, mere murmuring is not an option. Ours is the fourth house upstairs on the right. “House #152,” rented.

Mom didn’t seem to do it deliberately, but the kitchen was an instant hit

from the day we moved in. A large area with no furniture, windows always open, this was our war room at dinners and lunches. Here, stories were told, advice traded, judgments pronounced, and justice served. The ritual continued with empty plates, until Dad who always was done first, unceremoniously called an END to it.

The menu was lean and consistent. With no refrigerator, no appliances and no processed food, we were healthy by design. Mom, considered progressive, was traditional when it came to the art of dining. She cheerfully served us before she dined. We wondered if visitors ever discerned the times she feigned fullness for the benefit of the company of friends, relatives, and even friends of relatives. We took pride in our skillful entertaining abili-

Stariway to #152

ties, as artless as it might have seemed. It was always Open House.

The two bedrooms had half the fur-niture we owned—the parent’s bed and a steel cupboard. The other half was in the living room: a cane set of four chairs and a coffee table. The oldest four in any group earned the chairs. The younger had strong limbs. Here in this 15 x 12 feet space, we relaxed during the day, entertained most evenings and slept at night on our mats. This was our window to the world at large. Here we discussed sports and politics, wove conspiracy theories, planned weddings, and mourned losses.

It is 2 a.m. and Dad wakes me up with a whisper, standing by my bed (mat). I have a robotic reflex to this—wake up, listen for water drops down the stairs, pick the empty buckets, take my position on the stairs. Dad gets the other bees in position between the house and the water outlet down the stairs and around the house. For the next two hours, we pass buckets of water to the next in line, al-ternating with quick power naps on the stairs, while the dripping water fills the next bucket. The fresh morning air is a bonus.

Living upstairs came with its perks. The main door opened onto the balcony.

We spent long hours there, savoring viv-id flash backs and magical fast-forwards. From up there, we were part of a larger family. The drama unfolded in this rich milieu, chapters being written in an Open Book.

Mom’s monthly budget had a modest three columns—description, expenditure, and running total. Money came and left swiftly, with little need to hop in and out of a bank. The top priorities were grocery, rent and school fees. If this balance was disturbed, Dad brushed aside one course from the meals until further notice.

Life was easy. We got bored once a month. When we got bored, we went to the movies. When we went to the movies, we ate out. When we ate out, we ordered either a plate of idly or a dosa. When we ordered either an idly or a dosa, we spent a

By Usha Rao

little more moolah. When we spent a little more moolah, we couldn’t afford boredom for a whole month.

Not everything was so well orches-trated. Often, stuff played hooky—water, electricity, milk, sewage, plumbing, the bus or any combination thereof. There were the spontaneous visits to the doctor, the ration, or the cobbler.

The strategic daily trips for grocery, schools and work had to be woven in. Festivals were merrily fast forwarded in in-verse proportion to the budget. We never let the numerous volunteer opportunities pass by. For, that was the form of giving we could easily afford. We swung between chaos, uncertainty and an element of sur-prise. We could easily pass off as a novice rowing team with one Bow, a Stern, and many a Cox. This boat sailed the rough seas.

We have all moved on and lived in many cities and homes around the world. One thing we do with regularity is dig into our treasure chest of memories that “Home #152” afforded us—our master-piece.

I ask my 14 year old for his definition of happiness, looking for the definite link to money. He does not care about the rung of the financial ladder, he responds, he would be hap-py as long as there was status quo. Upwards would be good, not necessary. But downward, he says, is a sure path to unhappiness. He did get it right.

Dr. Seuss: Do not cry because it’s over, but smile because it happened. n

A technology entrepreneur, Usha Rao is influ-enced by her children’s flair for writing. She lives in Seattle and can be reached at [email protected].


By Nagaraja Rao

Levitating Yogini in Krakow

The main square, gloriously bright during the day, and magically lit up at night

travel


We’d never been to Central Eu-rope. That is most of us in my family, except for my daughter-

in-law Renata who hails from a village in Czech Republic, and my son, Ravi, who visited her there. Therefore, we decided to explore that part of the world that gave us one whom we call our own.

We signed up with the Globus tour company, which took us to Budapest (Hungary), Bratislava (Slovakia), Cesky Krumlov and Vienna (Austria), finally ending up in Prague (Czech Republic). From there we extended our tour to the village of Dobre to visit Renata’s family, where she, Ravi and my three-year-old granddaughter Zoya Nayani joined us. Our very memorable last stop was Krakow in Poland.

Yes, Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, located an hour and half drive from Krakow, was a place we wanted to visit. We knew full well that it would be a difficult experience.

I had spent my pre-teen years content-edly in South India, somewhat oblivious of what was happening so far away in a cruel war. Occassionally, I would hear of reports of war in our newspapers. Radios were very rare and needed a government permit to operate one. My own experi-ence of war was not too harsh. There was food rationing, which also meant shortage of food and other necessities. There were days when we had to be content with one meal a day, and we’d have to assure our-selves that others were in the same state that we were.

There were some days of terror when Japan, which had entered the war, bombed parts of northeast India and I remember that there was general confusion in the country as to which side we were on. Re-ports of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s meeting with Adolf Hitler vaguely meant that we would be free of the British rule with Hitler’s help.

Of course, Mahatma Gandhi decided, rightly so, to temporarily suspend the in-dependence movement against the British, recognizing that the demonic Nazi war was really against all humanity. With these recollections, I set foot in Krakow, Poland.

The main square is a wonderfully busy place with several streets converging into

a cohesive amalgamate of ac-tivity of open air eateries, street vendors, sculptures, horse drawn coaches and in-ternational tourists. A beau-tiful church in one corner along with high end shops, chic hotels and restaurants surrounding the square make it delightful.

Open air gymnasts, musi-cians, vendors of every sort make up for a passing show that entertain the visitors during the day and late into the night with a rock concert finale.

A saffron-clothed yogini (female yogi) sits smilingly in front of the church in an ascetic posture. She has a stick in front of her which she holds with her one arm. Suddenly you realize that she is sitting about two feet in the air above the side walk. We don’t know how she got herself elevated—we did not see her doing that. She sits unmoving, like a statue, and children check to see if there is any invisible support by wav-ing their hands underneath her. People drop coins on the ground in front of her. It is perhaps some kind of illusion that appears as a genuine yo-gic position. It seems incon-gruous. She does not belong to the passing show.

Not far from the city square is the Wawel Royal Castle which sits on a pictur-esque hill with a large spectac-ular vista of beautiful gardens and palaces. Currently, added to its charm is the exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “Lady with an Ermine.” After waiting for a short time, we enter a darkened room and see the lighted painting on the wall. It is a small, but splendid portrait painted around the year 1490. For those of us who are not art crit-ics, it is just magical.

Also near the square is the city’s Jew-ish quarter where once about 30,000 Jews lived their vibrant lives, now decimated to 700 or so. You cannot but feel the scope of tragedy that engulfed them. Our guide takes us to a small square, which is a re-mainder of their rich heritage. A little

sa ron lothed yogini emale yogi sits smilingly in

ront o the h r h in an as eti ost re he has a sti k in ront o

her whi h she holds with her one arm ddenly yo reali e that she is sitting a o t two eet in the air a o e the side walk

A typical passage between rows of inmate dormitories

One of the gas chambers

34 | INDIA CURRENTS | Southern California. | November 2015

garden, a synagogue and old row houses make up the scene. We are told that some of the scenes from the movie Schindler’s List were shot here. On one side of the square are a row of present day restaurants.

We are taken to see the larger part of the quarter starting with an exhibit on an open ground with a lot of metal chairs placed in disarray. This reminded us acute-ly, if symbolically, how the Nazis rounded up the Jewish tenants of the apartment houses and hurled their furniture out onto the streets.

We saw the locations of the entrance gates for the then walled-in Jewish Quar-ter. An exhibit of a small stretch of the wall is a stark reminder of what a horrific turn of events it must have been to this proud and gentle people.

It was a relief to visit Schindler’s fac-tory with exhibits displaying how, in the middle of the horrible Nazi enterprise, a self professed member of the Nazi party came to rescue hundreds of Jews from the cruel life of concentration camps. This building also serves as a World War II exhibition.

The visit to Schindler’s factory was a somber foreboding of what was to come the next day on our visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp site is about an hour and a half drive from Kra-kow. Soon after our arrival at Camp A, we formed a line to enter the site and after security check we got our headphones and set out with guides taking groups of about 15 people each. Our English speak-ing guide led us through the entrance gate

for what was a heartrending experience. We had seen movies and documentaries before, but this was different. The physi-cality of it, the mere scale of it, created an overwhelming feeling of horror. Building after building and room after room spoke of endless unimaginable cruelty imposed by one human being on another. The collection of old aluminum plates and bowls seemed painfully representative of the hunger that the inmates were subjected to. Large heaps of children’s glasses and shoes in an exhibit bore silent testimony to the atrocities inflicted on those innocent little lives.

The horror was somewhat softened be-cause of the sanitization of the site. All the human elements, such as skeletons, bones, etc., have been deliberately removed. But, still, the torturous intention of the Nazi re-gime is unbearably clear. The acute close-ness of human beings packed together on tiered bunks; stalls with just enough space for a standing person; a total absence of washing and bathing facilities; exposure to cold in the non-heated rooms; and finally the cruelly designed gas chambers required little imagination to realize what had taken place.

One cannot even imagine the bitterly cold mornings when roll call took place out in the yard. The inmates who were able to stand, dragged themselves out in their insufficient clothing and torn shoes—they were allowed to keep their shoes on for the ease of being herded here and there and lined up while the Nazi of-ficer conducting the roll call stood within

a shelter. The camp commandant’s family including his children lived in his quarters just outside the gate!

At Camp B, we see huge open railway platforms for unloading the unsuspect-ing human wave. Here, on a hot day, the area appeared infinitely endless, cleared of all vegetation, at the end of which were the now collapsed crematoriums. In the middle of the railway lines and platforms, a lonely wagon stands representing all those spaceless, airless vehicles that came in, packed with countless human beings.There were more buildings in this area, perhaps for the newly incoming unfortu-nate victims.

At the end of it all we were so exhaust-ed by the experience that we had become totally numb, feeling rather guilty even to belong to the human species.

On our flight from Krakow back to United States I visualized the main square. It seemed that Krakow has moved on, as though untouched by the the Holocaust, by brutal events of human history, oddly like the levitating yogini detached from the ground.

However, the presence of the Aus-chwitz Camp in the vicinity remains a reminder of the cruel slaughter of innocent citizens, not just for Krakow but for entire human race. n

Nagaraja Rao is a retired engineer and lives in Fremont, California with his wife Chandra.

Schindler’s desk at the Schindler MuseumLeonardo da Vinci’s painting “Lady with an Ermine”

November 2015 | Southern California. | www.indiacurrents.com | 35

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36 | INDIA CURRENTS | Southern California. | November 201536 | INDIA CURRENTS | Southern California. | November 2015

fused by the facts. On the

other hand, when federal hot shots are called in, there are still the professional jealousies and personal judgment that can and often do cloud the formal outcomes. If only!

There have been many noteworthy recent Hindi movies based on real or his-torical accounts including No One Killed Jessica, Bhaag Mikha Bhaag, Guru, Madras Café and Mary Kom. By extending the core definition of real-life to include his-torical accounts, the list can include Bandit Queen, Bawander, Jodhaa Akbar, Gangs of Wasseypur, The Attacks of 26/11 and even Ragini MMS as based on some semblance of actual events. Of these, the most cultur-ally perplexing are those compelling court dramas where the outcome is not so cer-tain, say, No One Killed Jessica or Talvar. In Gulzar’s book, Talvar serves as an insight-ful etching of a collective soul-searching. Do we simply walk away knowing that this is handled wrong while being weighed down by a sinking feeling of helplessness? Oh and oh, only if! n

EQ: A

films

TALVAR. Director: Meghna Gulzar. Play-ers: Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Neeraj Kabi, Gajraj Rao, Sohum Shah, Sum-it Gulati, Tabu. Music: Vishal Bharadwaj. Hindi with Eng. sub-tit. Theatrical release: Junglee Pictures.

Real life news stories can be tricky to transfer to the pseudo-fictional setting of the large screen the

minute the source “material” becomes murky. In the case of Talvar, which is based on a 2008 story about a double-murder near Delhi, the “reality” of the narrative gets instantly muddied by inac-curate or incomplete eye witness accounts of key players. What to do with a murder case when everyone is implicated and yet no one appears completely guilty or en-tirely innocent? As Gulzar and company’s brilliantly staged Talvar would have it, the possibilities are endless.

The quiet of a suburban Delhi morn-ing is permanently shattered for one family when the family’s 14-year-old daughter and the family’s 45-year-old chauffeur are found horrifically butchered. One line of circumstantial evidence points to Nutan Tandon (Sen Sharma) and her husband Ramesh Tandon (Kabi) as educated pro-fessionals who may have resorted to mur-der upon stumbling on their daughter and chauffeur together in her room after her curfew. Or, as some other circumstantial evidence suggests, could it have been Kanhaiya (Gulati), the Tandon’s house servant?

In Vishal Bharadwaj’s well-written story, the extremely high-profile real life persona of the oft-boggled investigation is fronted by Indian federal investigator Ashwin Kumar (Khan) who is called in after local cops practically butcher the initial police involvement. The sense of hopelessness about to engulf the entire case is summed up by the local constable Dhaniram (Rao) who unknowingly and egregiously destroys crucial first-account clues that could possibly have decided the outcome. Without solid evidence, practi-

Clouded Blood Trail By Aniruddh Chawda

cally all that is left is building a “case” based on circumstantial evi-dence.

The Indian legal tradi-tion of allowing circum-stantial re-telling of “what must have happened” may appear shocking to alter-native or even non-Indian jurisprudence based on ob-servable, physically verifiable crime restructuring. Only one judge needs to be con-vinced. The conflicting and clouded-by-now blood trails lead to a monumental quasi-legal quagmire. Ashwin’s vir-tual entrapping of an already unlikable character to confess to the crime on a lie detector test—with results that can’t be used in court—greatly under-mines Ashwin’s credibility and the government’s case along with our sensibilities about “innocent until.”

This fleeting hope and diminishing glory scenario is strongly put forth by di-rector Gulzar and Bharadwaj’s gifted story writing. It is well acted and easily carried by the sheer force of the character-driven vignettes from each principal suspect as they recount their involvement. The frus-tration that sets is not because we want to believe who did it but more because, in perfect hindsight, we druthers that one small detail or that one bloodstain could have been viewed sooner or in a different light. If only!

As “real” as the story is, the filmmak-er’s thumb-prints cannot escape positing a certain view the filmmaker would like to leave us with. And then we are back to that internal tug. There are brilliant caricatures that drive home the key arti-facts about provincial legal affairs, at least as depicted here. The local police—often poorly trained or underpaid—call the first shots on “declaring” what must have hap-pened. And dammit, they will not be con-

November 2015 | Southern California. | www.indiacurrents.com | 37 November 2015 | Southern California. | www.indiacurrents.com | 37

Skin Deep and Candy FlossSINGH IS BLIING. Director: Prabhu Deva. Players: Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson, Lara Dutta, Kay Kay Menon, Rati Agnihotri, Ku-nal Kapoor. Music: Meet Bros Anjjan, Manj Musik, Sajid-Wajid. Hindi with Eng. sub-tit. Theatrical release: Eros

To be up front, Singh in Bliing has no connection to Kumar’s huge 2008 hit Singh is Kinng, other than

both movies feature Kumar as an ethnic Punjabi character. In a way of life where well-placed, strategic name-dropping can set expectations—realistic or not—and pre-sell an allusion of success, Singh is Bli-ing wants to finish first in that school of cinematic succession. Shallow in writing, skin deep with acting chops and yet nail-ing some pedestrian comic timing, thanks to Kumar’s presence, Singh is Bliing gets to the finish line and has the last laugh.

For Raftaar (Kumar), coming of age as the scion of his Punjab village’s biggest land-owning family means only one thing —more partying with his equally dead-beat friends and stealing opportunities to break out the bhangra at the drop of a hat. Threatened with disinheritance or worse —being married off to a village tart he doesn’t like—Raftaar accepts his father’s (Yograj Singh) offer to travel to Goa to work for his father’s friend (Kapoor).

Arriving in Goa, Raftaar fibs his way into landing a job as a bodyguard even though he does not speak English—a key job requirement. The linguistic chal-lenged Raftaar’s gig gets a booster shot of complications with the arrival of his boss’s gorgeous daughter Sara (Jackson) from Europe. He does not understand English and she is not savvy with Hindi. As a go-between, they hire the mousy transla-tor Emily (Dutta), who may have a trick up her sleeve. Just about everything goes haywire when Sara’s European past, and her having crossed paths with the lecher-ous Mark (Menon), catches up with her in Goa.

For comic-adventures with a short leash on storytelling, the primary visuals are setting, setting and more setting. We go from striking eastern European castles and medieval walled hamlets to sunny beaches in Goa to golden grain fields of Punjab

bursting with new crop at the bat of an eye. With just a touch of flair from director Deva’s almost-c o n s t a n t l y moving film-ing style, it somehow all gels. The scen-ery and color saturation are pleasing. The action starts soon enough after Mark ar-rives to make mischief and that too is engulfed by the breezy delivery paced by the action sequences.

To add accent to the visual motif, hav-ing appropriate eye candy on hand can help tremendously. The beauty quota of the three leading actors—Kumar, Jackson and Dutta—amounts to one young female beauty queen and model (Jackson), one male hunk with super-model looks (Ku-mar) and one former Miss Universe (Dut-ta). With this much visual nibbling within reach, there is little room for complaining.

Newcomer Jackson is a young British beauty who was spotted by Indian film-maker A.L. Vijay, who offered her a lead in his Tamil language Madrasapattinam (2010). After appearing in several movies from South India, including S. Shankar’s mega-budget I (2014), and with no prior acting experience or family connections to movies whatsoever, Jackson has become a sensation. Virtually unknown in her homeland, she is mobbed by Indian fans as soon as she arrives on the sub-continent. From her stints in modeling, Jackson knows camera angels and lighting—and so far those factors have helped her get a footing in Indian movies.

The only drawback to this sizable-bud-get movie is the music. None of the tunes stand out as chart-busters, even though “Singh & Kaur,” voiced by Manj Musik, Nindy Kaur and Raftaar, offers a brief respite. Having multiple music directors

on the same soundtrack has not worked especially well for Hindi movies over the years and that is not about to change.

Perhaps the most notorious element to the packaging of Singh is Bliing was an early publicity poster that featured not only a slightly different title (Sing is Bling, with one I in Bling) but also a turban-clad Kumar holding a gun. Bowing to religious groups, Indian censors made the filmmak-ers revise the poster, though the poster remains widely available online. Even with the musical limitations in tow, Singh is Bli-ing still scores with no hits, no homeruns and yet no major errors either. n

EQ: B

Globe trekker, aesthete, pho-tographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Mil-waukee.

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LATA’S



THE VISIT. Director: M. Night Shya-malan. Players: Olyvia De Jonge; Ed Ox-enbould; Deanna Dunagan; Kathryn Hahn; Peter McRobbie; Benjamin Kane. Theatrical Release: Universal Pictures

After the debacle of After Earth and The Last AirBender, Manoj Night Shyamalan re-surfaces

with The Visit, a thriller with a comic trail. While horror is not new to the Oscar nominated director (for The Sixth Sense), weaving it with a chuckle-worthy comedy is perhaps a new genre for him. And he does succeed in his effort.

The premise is vintage Shyamalan —a children’s perspective; a broken marriage; a single mother; the “every-thing is normal” beginning and then enter unease and yes, the final twist in the tale. But it steers away from other Shyamalan films as there is no heavy-handed, self-important deep meaning in it. It has a light-hand, which makes it rise to an entertaining, unpretentious film.

The Visit is in the genre of “found foot-age” films (a pseudo documentary where much of the film is presented as if it were discovered), which Becca (De Jonge), the poised teenager, an aspiring film-maker, is making about their week-long visit to their grand-parents’ home in rural Pennsylvania. Her apprentice is her precocious younger brother Tyler (Oxenbould), who has been given a camera of his own and likes to pep everything up with his rapping. The un-usual thing about this visit is that the kids have never seen their grandparents before as their mother has been estranged from her parents for 25 years.

Yes, the lady hasn’t seen her parents since she walked out of their home after a bitter argument about the man she was marrying. Even though the husband has since abandoned her and she is battling life on her own, she hasn’t gone back to her parents. This is the first time that she has melted enough to let her kids visit them for a week.

The Visit which unfolds as regular

children visiting loving but strange grand-parents—Nana (a very convincingly odd Dunagan) and Pop-Pop (McRobbie), gets a bit uneasy very soon. The children are told that they are not to come out of their room after 9:30 p.m. and they are not to go into the basement due to “mold.” And, of course, that makes them do just that —and they make bewildering, unsettling discoveries.

Nana, the benevolent granny who insists on cooking and feeding the chil-dren during the day does strange things at night. Pop-Pop disappears in his shed and appears to be a different man altogether at times. The children discuss the goings-on on web-chats with their mother, but are told to give the old couple a chance as they are, well, old. And old people are odd people.

But when the eccentricity gives way to downright scary behavior, the children re-alize it is not just “old-age,” but something a lot more eerie. And this prepares us for a twist but when it comes, it is unexpected, unless you happen to be an Agatha Chris-tie fan.

The performances of both the kids are exceptional, even in the glossed-over bits about coming to terms with their dad abandoning them. Oxenbould is endear-

ing as the cleanliness freak rapper, while De Jonge has turned in a pitch-perfect condescending older sister. Dunagan is superb as she transitions from a loving granny to the one who is not above smil-ingly asking a grandkid to climb “right-in the oven” to clean it and slamming the door shut on her as a chilling joke. Hahn, as the mother, does justice to her role.

The writing, by Shayamalan himself, perhaps could have been tighter as the film does lose pace intermittently and later appears to rush towards the end. Some scenes are unnecessarily long and remain unexplained. Mercifully, The Visit comes without any trappings of high technology, intricate messages or even camera gim-micks and is all the more refreshing for it. In fact, it makes one wonder if the irre-pressible Tyler, with his hand-held camera and Becca, as a budding film-maker are not Shyamalan’s tongue-in-cheek refer-ences to himself as a kid.

Well done, Shyamalan, here’s looking forward to more from you. n

EQ: A

Madhumita Gupta is a freelance writer and a teacher.

By Madhumita Gupta

Horror in the Family


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music

Over the last few decades, slokas, bhajans, and ghazals, even tabla and mridangam bols and kanna-

kols (enunciated beats), instead of being practiced by the learned few Indians, have become a global interpretive art, finding a spot in trance, jazz, new age, world music, and Hollywood, of course.

This inclusion has led to growing rec-ognition of the music and musicians. And so it is, that David Vito Gregoli and Mala Ganguly’s Mahadeva has been nomi-nated for The Hollywood Music In Media Awards® (HMMA) in the World music genre. The HMMA recognizes and honors the music of visual mediums (film, TV, movie trailers, video games, commercials, etc.); the talented individuals responsible for creating, producing and placing it; and the music of artists, both mainstream and independent, from around the globe.

The winners will be announced in No-vember 2015.

You will have heard Ganguly’s voice in movies such as Eat Pray Love, Mission Impossible 4, An American Affair, and The Man from Elysian Field. And also perhaps, from recordings such as Prana and Bhajan (Re)Beats, of which Mahadeva is a part.

“It was yog (preordained) that I live in the United States,” Ganguly reminisces. “I came to learn from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan in the 80s. I was in the middle of a talented pool of people—my bar was high, since Kolkata in those days was the hub of all music activity. I performed a few times here and was inspired by the appreciation and respect I received. The Sengupta fam-ily of Covina was generous enough to host me. So I just stayed!”

Ganguly’s mom was a gifted singer herself, so her childhood was spent receiv-ing classical training in music and the per-forming arts. By 12, Ganguly was already singing on the radio and performing at concerts; as well as dabbling in dancing and acting.

Around that time, she was offered a role in the Bengali movie Parineeta, but it was time to make a choice about where to focus her energies; music was it. The fa-

mous film director Hemant Kumar chose her as the playback singer for many of his Bengali movies, such as Bandhan, which was later made in Hindi as well.

Ganguly is well-versed in many genres—ghazals, classical, Rabindra San-geet, Nazrul Geeti, etc. This talent and her voice wins over skeptics, “The L.A. Pun-jabi audiences at first rejected a Bengali singer, ‘Bengalis cannot possibly correctly pronounce Urdu words!’—but then, the first event lasted for hours, ending at 4 a.m. the next day.” For Ganguly, that was an omen of the trajectory her career would take. “I never had a business card, [still] the invitations were endless, just through word of mouth. I am grateful to support-ers such as the late Ranjan Guha, a family friend.”

Ganguly expanded her repertoire by singing for Anjani Ambegaonkar’s Kathak ensembles, which took her, over the next three decades, to prestigious stages such as at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, and New York’s Lincoln Center.

In 1995, she was approached by Ustad Zakir Hussain for lending her voice to a film called Saaz. Many will remember that the movie was about music and musicians. However, Ganguly had green card issues

By Priya Das

and had to decline. That same year, she found herself doing a Nike com-mercial during the basketball season.

The commercial won an award and her relationship with mainstream U.S. media was cemented.

There were other commercials such as with Ameritrade and eBay, her voice was cast in Hollywood movies, the first being Hallmark’s Christmas Box, which was aired repeatedly. She was also approached by other musicians to collaborate on record-ings, such as Gregoli. Gregoli is a multi-instrumentalist with a deep connection to Asian spirituality, as is evidenced in the name of his recording label “Dharmapala” (keeper of dharma or true way of life).

Ganguly is also a spiritual person, elaborating that “Music is my strength, my inspiration. I worship Lata Mangeshkar, Mehdi Hassan, Pratima Bannerji, Ustad Amir Khan … When Ustad Ali Akbar Khan used to perform, he would be one with God. That is what I seek, too, that caliber is what I hold as my goal.” Her current projects include forming and creat-ing music for a fusion band called Butter-flies, which she has “dreamed of for many years.”

Incidentally, Ganguly is also a visual artist, the album cover art for Bhajan Re-beats/ Mahadeva was designed by her. n

Priya Das is an enthusiastic follower of world music and avidly tracks intersecting points between folk, classical, jazz and other genres.

Mahadeva Gets the Nomination!

Mala Ganguly


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A Squashable FestivalBy Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff

keys are sacrificed each year for Ameri-can Thanksgiving dinners. However, a Thanksgiving menu does not have to center around turkey, or contain any meat at all. California’s diverse population in-cludes people of many backgrounds, pal-ates and lifestyles, gathering for a Thanks-giving meal.

There are various stories of the origin of Thanksgiving in America. One tale tells that the

Wampanoag tribe of Native Ameri-cans showed the settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts how to hunt, fish and grow life-sustaining crops like corn and squash. This subsequent-ly resulted in a bountiful harvest and a food-sharing celebration: the first Thanksgiving!

Today Thanksgiving is a non-religious holiday that unites people with food and festivities. It is also a sad reminder of the devastating persecution suffered by Na-tive Americans at the hands of European settlers.

Turkey is the customary main dish. Although the President pardons one lucky turkey every year, some 50 million tur-

recipes

Americans are increasingly eating lighter meals, creating menus with from a variety of seasonal ingredi-ents cooked with ethnic flavors and techniques. The following two recipes,

Kabocha Squash Curry with Sweet Pota-toes, and Wild Rice with Fresh Pomegran-ate Seeds and Pine Nuts, go together well, and exemplify this fusion of ethnicities, featuring flavors from around the world, and using seasonal ingredients. n

Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff, author of Fla-vors Of India: Vegetarian Indian Cuisine is a co-owner of Other Avenues Food Coopera-tive in San Francisco. Serena Sacharoff is a chef, an illustrator and an art student.

Illustration by Serena Sacharoff

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Kabocha Squash Curry with Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients: Makes eight to ten servings 1 medium size Kabocha squash (2 to 2 ½ lbs.), enough to yield approximately 8 cups of chunks 2 large Garnet sweet potatoes (1/2 lb.), to yield approximately 3 cups of chunks 2 cups of water for steaming the vegetables4 cloves of garlic, peeled¼ tsp cayenne powder 1½ cups light coconut milk whisked together with 2 cups water3 tbsp cooking oil1 onion, finely chopped½ red bell pepper cut into small pieces after removing seeds and veins2 tsp minced or finely shredded fresh ginger1 tsp saltJuice of a freshly squeezed lime or lemon2–3 tbsp fresh cilantro leaves for garnish

MethodUsing a sharp knife, cut off the stem

of the squash and then cut the squash into halves. Cutting hard squash can be intimidating at first, but it gets easier with practice. Remove the seeds and fibers from the halves, and cut each half into wedges or large pieces. Cut the sweet potatoes into 2 or 3 pieces each. Arrange the squash and sweet potatoes pieces in a steamer basket. Place two cups of water in a large pot or a kadhai (wok) with a tight fitting lid. Set the filled steamer basket in the pot and cover. Steam the vegetables for 15 minutes, just long enough to soften them slightly and loosen their skin. Transfer to a large planter to cool. When cool, peel them with a small sharp knife and discard the skin. Cut into smaller, bite-size pieces and set aside.

Next, prepare a garlic-cayenne paste as follows: Using a mortar and pestle, or a rolling pin, mash the garlic pieces with the cayenne powder to make a coarse paste. Whisk the garlic-cayenne paste into the coconut milk and water, mixing until well blended. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Saute the onion for a few minutes until it is wilt-ed, and then add the red pepper and ginger. Stir-fry for two minutes. Add the squash and potato pieces and stir fry the vegetables for a five minutes. Then add the coconut-milk mixture and salt. Stir again, cover, and

cook gently for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir the vegetables gently so that all of the pieces are cooked evenly, but not crushed, and nothing sticks to the bot-tom of the pan. The curry is done when the sauce has thickened and the squash and potato pieces are soft.

Add the freshly squeezed lime or lem-on juice, stir gently, and garnish with fresh cilantro. Serve with rice, or the wild rice entrée below.

Wild Rice with Fresh Pome-granate Seeds and Pine Nuts

Wild rice is not actually rice, but the seed of an aquatic grass native to the Great Lakes region of the United States. Native Americans have harvested it by hand for centuries. Wild rice has a unique, nutty flavor and is very nutritious, containing more protein and fiber than brown rice. The addition of pine nuts and pomegran-ate seeds makes this dish festive.

Ingredients: Makes eight to ten servings 2¾ cups of water½ tsp salt (optional)1 tsp oil (optional) 1 cup wild rice, rinsed in warm water and thoroughly drained ¼ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted in a dry frying pan for a few minutes

(do not burn)¼ cup fresh pomegranate seeds

MethodBoil the water with the optional salt

and oil. Add the rinsed and drained wild rice, stir, and allow the mixture to come to a boil again. Turn the heat down to simmer. Cover and cook for 45 minutes.

The rice is done when half the rice kernels appear to have been opened (the inside looks white) and most of the wa-ter is gone. Cover again, and turn off the heat, and leave the lid on for 10 to 15 minutes. Then uncover and check to see that the water is evaporated.

Freshly harvested wild rice cooks more quickly than older rice, but it’s diffi-cult to know the age of the rice when you purchase it. If, after 45 minutes, the rice appears done but there is still too much water, cook for a few minutes uncovered over a medium-high flame to evaporate the water, or simply drain off any excess water. (Save this nutritious water for a soup base).

Fluff the rice gently and transfer it to a serving bowl. Top with the roasted pine nuts and fresh pomegranate seeds, and serve. Wild rice is flavorful, chewy and substantial, so a serving of 1/3 to 1/2 cup per person is sufficient. n

A Creative Commons image by TLexano



We'll feature the top five winning pictures in our year-end issue + winners will get a free dinner at Spice Affair restaurant!

#IndiaCurrentsFestiveDivaChallenge

#IndiaCurrentsFestiveDivaChallenge

JUDGES: Partner


I’m writing on behalf of my brother, because I know he’ll never ask for help himself. He gets really nervous at the

thought of approaching women. Any sugges-tions for him?

What a supportive sister you are! Anxiety is very common and can

stop a guy from talking to a woman he’s attracted to—or flubbing the encounter if he does. Here are five of the most effec-tive ways to do it:

i) It starts non-verballyThe old story about eyes meeting

across a crowded room is a classic for a reason. Just about all communication be-gins non-verbally, and you can get a sense of whether a woman will be receptive to talking with you before walking over. Start by catching her eye and smiling; if she meets your gaze and smiles back, it’s likely an invitation to approach and get to know her better.

ii) Find on Site conversation-startersIf you see a woman you’d like to talk

to, scan the area for something unusual that you can casually bring up to her. If a guy is acting ridiculously in the vicinity, for example, you could point to him and say, “Hey, you should really keep your boyfriend on a shorter leash!” You’ll likely get a laugh and have an inroad to further conversation.

iii) Make use of overheard commentsIf you’re sitting within earshot of an in-

teresting woman as she’s talking to friends, listen for key elements in the conversation. Use this information to your advantage. For example you could approach her and say something like, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about the World Cup … I’m a huge soccer fan!” If she responds positively, ask for her num-ber. You’ll both know you already have something in common for your first date!

iv) Ask her opinionAsking her opinion is a great way

to get the conversation flowing to see if you’re compatible. An example might be, “Hey, I was just talking to a friend earlier today and he seems to think _______, but I don’t agree. What’s your take?”

v) Be genuineFinally, the most important element of

communication success is to be genuine. Be yourself! You want her to like you for you anyway, so bring out what’s cool about you as you’re talking and see if she responds. If she doesn’t, she’s probably not a good match anyway. n

By Jasbina Ahluwalia

Q

A

relationship diva

Overcoming Anxiety and Getting that First Date

Jasbina is the founder and president of Inter-sections Match, the only personalized match-making and dating coaching firm serving singles of South Asian descent in the United States. She is also the host of Intersections Talk Radio. [email protected].

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events

November 6 Friday Dance Conversations—Festival of Dance and Music. This two part (sec-ond part to be presented in Winter 2016) festival will look at the ways in which Indian dance and music makes meaning in the twenty-first century. Composer/conductor, Kanniks Kannikeswaran will work with UCI musicians and Orange County’s South Asian community to create his hybrid performance Sharad: A Musical Celebration of Autumn, bringing

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CULTURAL CALENDER

Rain—A Clssical Dance Performance. Choreographed work by Mohiniyattam dancer, Vijayalak-shmi, December 5

NOVEMBER

together classical western choral music with Indian classical music and dance. Workshops and conversations/lectures/

discussions are planned to explore the idea of arts, community, and the city. Orga-nized by Ektaa Center, Arpana Dance


Company, and CTSA’s the Department of Music. UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, 4002 Mesa Road., Irvine. $25, $15 students. (949) 824-2787. www.art.uci.edu/tickets, www.arts.uci.edu.

November 7 Saturday Emerging Technologies: How Will They Impact Our Lives? Learn about the latest advancements in emerg-ing technologies, Interconnected medical devices, unmanned drones and sustain-ability efforts to combat climate change. Expand your network and multiply your opportunities. Organized by ASEI So Cal American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin. 8 a.m.-2 p.m. California State University Long Beach Rm 312 Engineering and Computer Science Bldg, 1293 Palo Verde Ave., Long Beach. $25. (424) 263-7717. [email protected]. www.socalasei.org, www.emergingtechnologies2015.event-brite.com. Diwali Fest 2015. Featuring vendor and resource booths, food vendors, cul-tural experiences and performances. 5:30 p.m. A symbolic lamp lighting ceremony with Irvine City officials, dignitaries and community leaders will light a diya to sig-nify the message of the festival. Organized by EKTAA Center. 2-8 p.m. Irvine City Hall Piazza, 1 Civic Center Plaza, Irvine . Free. (949) 300-8912. [email protected]. www.ektaacenter.org. Vocal Concert by Ramakrish-nan Murth. Accompanied by R.K.Shriramkumar (violin) and K.Arun Prakash (mridangam). Organized by South Indian Music Academy. 5 p.m. Hoover Middle School Auditorium, 3501 Country Club Drive., Lakewood. (909) 618-7685, (408) 910-5328. www.simala.net.

November 14 Saturday Vocal Concert by Sesha Chary. Ac-companied by Shiva Ramamurthi (violin) and Raamkumar Balamurthi (mridan-gam). Organized by South Indian Music Academy. 5 p.m. Hoover Middle School Auditorium, 3501 Country Club Drive., Lakewood. (909) 618-7685, (408) 910-

5328. www.simala.net. Regional Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. Focusing on specific sectors including Digital India, renewable energy and investments in social impact enterprises in India. The business meet scheduled on Nov.14 will include panel discussions and presentations on focus sectors and additional topics such as Make In India, Swacch Bharat, Innovation and Entre-preneurship etc., as well as B2B meetings and B2G meetings with Indian official and business delegations. Ends Nov. 15. Organized by Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA). 12-6 p.m. The Westin Bo-naventure Hotel and Suites, 404 S Figueroa St., Los Angeles. www.oifc.in.

November 22 Sunday Sarod Recital. Featuring Debojyoti Bose (sarod) and Abhijeet Banerjee

(tabla). Organized by Dhwani Academy of Percussion Music. 3 p.m. Savla’s Resi-dence, 746 S Lotus Ave,. Pasadena. (714) 366-2492. [email protected]. www.dhwaniacademy.net.

December 5 Saturday

Rain—A Classical Dance Perfor-mance. An innovative choreographed work by Mohiniyattam dancer, Vijayalak-shmi. Opening performance by Kamaljeet Ahluwalia (santoor) and Jas Ahluwalia (tabla). Organized by The Mohiniyattam Institute and ALAPIO. 6 p.m. Performing Arts Education Center, 28545 W Driver Ave., Agoura Hills. $125, $100, $75, $50, $35. (818) 397-8421. www.thePAECs.org, www.vijayalakshmi.net.

Dance Conversations, Kanniks Kannikeswaran creates his hybrid performance, Sharad: A Musical Celebration of Autumn, November 6

© Copyright 2015 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.



Many folks have been raised to think coconut oil is the central culprit in the cast of

dietary characters responsible for heart disease and chronic disease. Coconut oil can be a powerfully effective nutritional tool in our quest to improve body com-position and reverse diseases. Medical student, Nihaal Karnik reviews the research behind coconut oil, and then our clinical dietician Prerna Uppal and I will share some of our experiences from the clinic at the end.

IntroductionLike every young In-

dian kid in America there is nothing I dreaded more than the blue bot-tle: yes….the coconut oil bottle my mother would heat on a weekly basis. No, mom was not ahead of the curve with regards to consuming coconut oil. Like every other Indian mom she was absolutely hell bent on heating that greasy stuff and work-ing it into our hair for a good 45 minutes. And like all children, I fussed, squirmed, and went to bed with a grease soaked scalp promis-ing I would never ever buy this stuff when I am an adult. Fast forward 20 years and I am at the grocery store about once every two months buying a massive jar of coconut oil for myself.

Am I using it for my hair? Well….moms are always right, so yes. But the majority of that oil goes towards my daily cooking. Whether I am frying eggs or heating up some ground turkey,

From Villain to Victor

healthy life

I cannot remember the last meal I cooked without some coconut oil.

Although a variety of misconceptions exist about the safety of coconut oil with regards to diet, scientific literature has begun to emerge that supports the use of coconut oil.Let’s explore everything coconut: from the beginning of the theory concerning its health hazard to modern research which

proves otherwise.

Key Terms and BackgroundBefore exploring the science of coconut

oil, it is important to look at some terms that will be used throughout this post:

Saturated Fats—Simply put, saturated fats refer to any fat that remains a solid at room temperature. Traditional nutrition has decried the use of saturated fats in one’s diet, however they are not the devil of a healthy diet. In fact, when processed

Clinical insights on Coconut Oil

sugars and excessive carbohydrates are replaced with saturated fats we tend to eat a diet more in line with those of our early ancestors. Remember, coconut oil is tech-nically a saturated fat.

Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCTs)—These refer to a class of fatty acids that are intermediate in length. For instance, most fat in the body is long chain form; most fats from cow’s milk is short chain. A growing body of evidence sug-

gests MCTs (such as coconut oil) help burn body fat and lead to weight loss. Coconut Oil. Let’s dig a bit deeper into this MCT. Unfortu-nately, the recent trend to incorpo-rate more coconut oil in the diet has led to a slew of cheap alterna-tives which are not good forms of coconut oil. Like all foods we eat, not all coconut oil is created equally. If you are going to use coconut oil, then don’t skip out on spending an extra $1 or $2; it’s well worth the investment. Prerna Uppal, a dietician suggests “virgin coconut oil (VCO) as it is the least refined and has the higher number of antioxidants.” She recommends “Nutiva organic virgin coconut oil.”

So Why Has Coconut Oil Been Labeled as a Bad Thing

Thomas Brennan, a professor of nutri-tional sciences at Cornell University, offers a simple explanation of why it has been implicated as a heart disease risk factor. In a 2011 interview with the New York Times, he tells us, “Most of the studies involv-ing coconut oil were done with partially hydrogenated coconut oil, which research-ers used because they needed to raise the cholesterol levels of their rabbits in order to collect certain data.” This simply means

By Nihaal Karnik and Ronesh Sinha


there was a pre-conceived bias since re-searchers were using processed coconut oil (remember what we said about all coconut oil not being equal?” He further states, “Virgin coconut oil, which has not been chemically treated, is a different thing in terms of a health risk perspective. And maybe it isn’t so bad for you after all.”

It is clear that improper science, a lack of using proper coconut oil, and repeated misinformation has labeled coconut oil as a villain to any advocate of a healthy lifestyle.

From Villain to Victor: Emerging Research Supporting the Use of Coconut Oil

I could devote pages upon pages to emerging research about potential ben-efits. Instead, I will try to highlight the main points by presenting a simple list.

Lipid Maintenance and Fat Burning. Researchers at the University of Kerala re-cently published a study in the British Jour-nal Of Nutrition. In this study the group points out that VCO 1) helped improve lipid panel results and 2) directly reduced fat formation. The group further conclud-ed that these two findings suggest that a diet in coconut oil could reduce one’s risk for coronary heart disease (CHD).

Anti-Inflammatory/Antioxidant Properties. Anti-inflammatory and an-tioxidant rich foods are important for a healthy diet. Both are essential in main-taining a body free of cellular damage.

New research shows VCO may be such a potent anti-inflammatory agent, that it could help treat various forms of arthritis (remember, a lot of arthritic conditions are due to a pro or high inflammatory state). The biggest selling point of VCO is its antioxidant property. The problem with cooking with other media such as olive oil concerns high heat and oxidative damage. Simply put, when we fry things in olive oil, the olive oil is so hot that vari-ous chemicals become oxidized or rather damaged. So even though olive oil may be good for us, at high temperatures the chemical changes are actually damaging at a cellular level. Conversely, VCO does not oxidize or get damaged at high tem-peratures. In fact, current research shows that this lack of damage has heart healthy benefits. Antimicrobial activity. One of the nastiest hospital infections is Clostridium

Dificile (a really nasty bacteria). It is a ma-jor cause of severe diarrhea and a very hard pathogen to treat. That said, a study shows that laboratory testing (called in vitro) of this super nasty bug with VCO is effec-tive. In other words, VCO is so potent as an antimicrobial agent it has promising abilities to treat tough bacterial infections. Quality of Life Among Breast Cancer Patients. Another study found consum-ing VCO during chemotherapy improved functioning and quality of life among 60 patients who received VCO as part of the diet.

Final ThoughtsA brief review of history shows that

coconut oil was unfairly cast as an evil oil due to misinformation and poor science. Dogmatic adherence to outdated studies still casts fear about its usage with doctors, patients, and wellness experts.

The growing body of literature sur-rounding VCO is promising. However, more laboratory and human trial research needs to be done.

Furthermore, one of the most important things to take away is knowing that not all coconut oils are created equally. Remem-ber, try to buy organic and virgin coconut oil as it has the most antioxidants (the good stuff that protects our cells).

As a medical student I constantly evalu-ate the medical science of new advance-ments. As much as I am on board with the VCO train there are two things I would like to see. First, would be long term research in a large patient population using VCO. It is not that I am a skeptic; rather the gold standards of medical claims are supported by these types of studies. Second, I would like to see dietary re-search where VCOs replace carbohydrates, processed foods,and sugar as an energy source. To date, few if any studies assess this model.

Tips on getting nuttier with coconut oil. Remember, adding saturated fats and MCTs to the diet are only beneficial if we eliminate unnecessary carbohydrates, processed foods, and sugar. Furthermore, make sure you buy the right stuff. Feel like reading this topic on your own? Then defi-nitely look at any studies that assess VCO, not just any regular coconut oil.

So I guess, mom is always right. About once a week I squirm, fuss, and moan. This time it’s about pouring over text-

books (mainly because I have procras-tinated) while I have a scalp soaking in greasy coconut oil. As I lie in bed tonight (with a towel over my pillow of course), I can go ahead and rest knowing that maybe coconut oil for everyday use is not so crazy after all.

Clinic Insights from Dr. Ron and Prerna

I know the information about coconut oil and saturated fat in general can be very confusing. I suggest you follow our general principle of self-experimentation. There is enough compelling evidence to suggest that safely using coconut oil in reasonable portions does not have harmful effects, and may in fact promote health benefits. As Nihaal mentioned, Prerna and I recommend it in conjunction with healthy anti-inflammatory foods and life-style habits. So many patients we see in the clinic have direct evidence of suffering from chronic inflammation, and simply adding coconut oil to an inflammatory diet and lifestyle not only is ineffective, but can be harmful as well. Remember, even the highest quality fats are not immune to the dangerous process of oxidation which occurs from consuming unhealthy foods. Once these foods are removed and coco-nut oil is added, we do not see cholesterol and inflammatory markers go up.

We see this effect in our Indian patients from regions like Kerala where coconut oil is a staple food. Although prior studies suggested coconut oil may be a potential cause of increased heart disease risk in Kerala and other parts of Southern India, in our experience we have noted that it is the excess carbohydrate consumption and sedentary lifestyle which are predomi-nantly responsible.

We consistently see insulin resistance markers and metabolic syndrome reduce or resolve when our South Indians rein-troduce coconut oil in the context of a healthier nutrition and lifestyle plan. Not only do risk numbers improve, but en-ergy levels increase, and body composition trends in a healthier direction with reduced waistlines/visceral fat.n

Ronesh Sinha, M.D. is a physician for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation who sees high risk South Asian patients, he blogs at southa-sianhealthsolution.org, and co-hosts a South Asian radio show on health.



November 1 Sunday Overcoming Nervousness. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glen-dale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.

November 7 Saturday Veda Mela. Features workshops on Ayurveda and Yoga, Curated offering of classes and vendors for devotees of yoga, art, wisdom and wellness. Ends Nov. 8. 8:45 a.m.-6:45 p.m. Veda MeLA, 1933 S. Broadway, Lower Level, Los Angeles. (213) 222-1440. www.vedamela.com.

November 8 Sunday A Spiritual Approach to World Peace. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.

November 15 Sunday Habit: Your Master or Your Slave? Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619)

SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.

November 16 Monday Kirtan with Kamini. 7-8:30 p.m. 2631 Bloom St, Simi Valley, 93063. Free. [email protected]. www.meetup.com/SimiValleyKirtan/events/215382642/.

November 22 Sunday Giving Thanks for Life’s Blessings. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Real-ization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.

November 29 Sunday The Purpose of Life. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hol-lywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.

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I am pregnant for the first time after many years of trying and medical con-cerns. So, I feel this is a major achieve-

ment and at first I couldn’t even believe it was happening. Now that it’s been about twenty weeks, it’s settling in: I am really pregnant and I am going to have a new baby. I am a school teacher working with a lot of children each year. I have told the administration that I will need to be on maternity leave and now I am telling the students as well. I am surprised by their reactions. Some are certainly excited that I am pregnant, but others are quite up-set. They feel that I will never return; they are not as important to me anymore; are clingy, sad or even angry and a bit envious about my having my own baby. I didn’t expect so much reaction and quite honestly don’t now how to respond. Where is all this coming from?

It’s good that you want to un-derstand yours students’ reactions. Teachers have a parental role in

ideas about your leaving. You may also find out what is going on at home with their parents. Your caring and listening presence will do a lot for them.

Then you can remind them that you will be thinking about them while you are away and that you will miss them and will hear about them through the substitute teacher and will look forward to coming back, so you can be with them all. You can even give them a little gift, that will be like a transitional object they can hold that will remind them of you. These words and small rituals convey connection that children need. n

Alzak Amlani, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist of Indian descent in the Bay Area. 650-325-8393. Visit www.wholenesstherapy.com

school with young children. I trust many of these students feel your maternal pres-ence and care and are a bit attached to you in this way. With very busy parents these days who are often working, children are not getting enough parenting. So, they are hungry for caring adults to offer mentor-ship and nurturance. You may be playing that role in their life.

The kids know you will be leaving to care full time for this baby and they will be without you. This reality needs to be acknowledged for some of your students. So, when they get clingy, angry, distant, resistant or sad inquire into it a bit. You can ask things like: Are you upset that I am leaving in a couple of months? I know I will have a baby of my own; maybe that makes you upset? I understand if you are not happy about that. This can be said in a contactful, caring and sensitive way, where the kids feel your attachment and concern.

Listen to their feelings, stories and

Q

dear doctor

A

Dealing with Reactions to My PregnancyBy Alzak Amlani

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The Mediocre World of Malcolm Gladwellthe last word

For decades, I have wondered about the Malcolm Gladwell phenomenon. His nonfiction books sell like hot cakes, his appearances fetch enormous fees, and people claim he is

a genius. Yet, when I read his books with the eye of a scientist, I find them full of hyperbole.

After trying for years, I finally slogged through the Tipping Point and Blink recently. Now, more than ever, I feel that the Gladwell myth is exactly that, a myth. His position as a staff writer for the New Yorker has undoubtedly given him credibility and a prestigious platform. But is his success well-deserved?

In Blink, the author postulates that intuitive judgments about people or situations are often better than detailed analysis. On the surface, this sounds like an attrac-tive hypothesis. But then he elaborates with exam-ples that, with the help of a Niagara of words, he tries to fit into his theory. His first example is the purchase of an ancient Greek statue by the Getty museum. Expert analyses led the cura-tors to believe that the work was authentic, yet, on the basis of a visual inspection, other experts concluded that it was a fraud.

Does this example prove Gladwell’s point? Not quite, because the Getty still ended up using chemical and physical analyses to reach its final conclusion.

Sometimes Gladwell reverses course, as in the example of the infamous shooting of Ama-dou Diallo in the Bronx in 1999. In that case, the cops allegedly inferred that a black man could not be standing outside his apartment late at night unless he was armed, and killed him. You would think that this example disproves Gladwell’s theory that intuition is superior to analysis but he gets around the problem by theorizing that darkness compromised the cops’ “mind reading” abilities. He claims that in crisis situations, we suffer from “temporary autism” and postulates that we can hone our “mind reading” powers by over-coming our prejudices. Is your head reeling already?

Gladwell coins new expressions like “thin-slicing,” which, roughly translated, means the ability to discern a situation based on bits of information. “Listening with your eyes,” and “rapid cognition” are also some jargon terms that he manufactures. The trouble is that each of these processes uses a slightly differ-ent skill.

For example, Gladwell quotes a Chicago cardiologist, who, based on only four diagnostic factors, successfully predicted his patients’ heart attacks. But, obviously, this was not a case of “mind reading” or “listening with your eyes.” The four factors were developed after years of painstaking collection of data, which was then “thin sliced.” So what is Gladwell’s point? That sometimes intuition works and sometimes it doesn’t or has to be supported or contradicted by data or other skills? What else is new?

Social scientists and psychologists have long challenged Gladwell’s theories and conclusions. But to no avail. His books keep on selling.

In The Tipping Point, the author explains how fads work. He quotes, at length, the example of Hush Puppies shoes, which, according to him, became popular because two hipsters walked around New York wearing them. He calls such people “connec-tors.” He then coins other terms such as “stickiness” of certain phenomenon and the “power of context.”

To prove his theory of “connectors,” Gladwell uses the famous experiment of “six degrees of separation,” developed

in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, who set out to prove that it took only six acquaintances to pass a letter between two

randomly selected people. What most readers don’t know is that the experiment has long been debunked. Yet, the Tipping Point was a huge success, perhaps because corporations, wanting to use Gladwell’s theories for marketing and advertising purposes, invited him to speechify.

Ever since the first skeptical review of the Tip-ping Point in the New York Times, scientists intel-lectuals, and journalists have pointed out the thin premises based on which Gladwell over-reaches his conclusions. David Brooks, in a Times review

of Blink in 2005 quipped that while the “thin-slicing” part of his brain was enamored of Gladwell’s

theories, the “thick-slicing” part wanted more than entertaining anecdotes; he wanted a comprehensive

theory of the whole. And he wanted to know more about how our brains performed these miracles. Other reviewers

have pointed out that Gladwell makes the common mistake of confusing correlation with causation.

Reaction to Gladwell’s latest books, Outliers and David and Goliath, have finally reached a crescendo of negativity, so much so that one critic quaintly observed that we may finally be at a tipping point of a realistic assessment of the author’s works.

Why then do his books keep selling? Another critic explained it this way. “Malcolm Gladwell’s books sell because he makes dumb people feel smart.”

I could not agree more. After all, Gladwell himself said, “If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then he/she is not the audience!” What Gladwell is saying is that anyone equipped to properly review the author’s work should not read it.

Most writers want just the opposite from their readers. I could not agree more. n

Sarita Sarvate (www.saritasarvate.com) has pub-lished commentaries for New America Media, KQED FM, San Jose Mercury News, the Oak-land Tribune, and many nationwide publications.

By Sarita Sarvate

Yet, The Tipping Point

was a huge suc-cess, perhaps because corporations, wanting to use Gladwell’s theo-ries for marketing and advertising purposes,

invited him to speechify.

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RAMESH BHAMBHRA

NOTE: 1. Rates are for owner-occupied purchase. 2. Rates quoted based on 75LTV and FICO more than 740. 3. Rates for Jumbo loans vary with loan amount. 4. Rates as of October18, 2015.

Note: Rates quoted are for approved loans and are subject to change without notice.

Additionally, there may be other restrictions that could apply in specific loan scenarios that could change the actual rates applicable.

Rates provided as a general guideline only.

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RAMESH BHAMBHRARAMESH BHAMBHRA

Home & Loan TeamCalifornia’s

Since

1985

Owner Occupied

Investment Property

Purchase Loans

Re-Finance Loans

LET ME HELP YOU PLAN ALL YOUR REAL ESTATE NEEDS!

Change Is In The Air!Wishing a Happy Diwali From

30 yr Fixed conforming 3.750% 3.750% 15 yr Fixed conforming 3.000% 3.000%5/1 Comforming 2.750% 2.750%30 yr Conf-Jumbo 3.875% 3.875% 5/1 yr Conf-Jumbo 3.125% 3.125%

Sample No Cost Rates

Program Rate APR

Now See Us on the Web!For Current Rates & Real Estate updates check:

www.care-mor.com & www.rameshbhambhra.com

[email protected]

“The Standard of Care”

OPEN HOUSE REALTY

Documents

November 2015 Southern California Edition